Coolpad, a Chinese smartphone brand, recently added a new smartphone in its budget series; Coolpad Mega 3. The smartphone is all plastic, and the USP of this smartphone is the three SIM slots. It comes with 8 MP camera on both sides with flash, and a beauty mode is embedded into the camera app. This budget smartphone is priced at Rs. 6,999. Let us see if this smartphone is worth the money.
Design
Where all other brands adapt metal casing for their smartphone (except Motorola), Coolpad Mega 3 comes in a plastic casing and removable back cover. The 5.5 inches HD IPS display on the front sits with a thick black border around it to give it a bezel-less display design. Above the display is the 8 MP front facing camera and LED flash, along with the light sensor and notification LED. The navigation buttons are touch reactive and are placed below the display.
The back panel is plastic with a stripe pattern which makes it easier to hold in hand and increase the grip. The left edge has the volume rocker, and the power button is on the right side, you’ll find the 3.5 mm audio port on the top edge and the micro USB port for charging and data transfer is on the bottom edge. The loudspeaker is on the back with tiny plastic bumps to keep the phone elevated, so the sound from the speaker won’t get muffled. Above the loudspeaker is the Coolpad branding and the primary camera is on the top half part with LED flashlight.
Display
Coolpad Mega 3 comes with a 5.5 inches HD display, 720p resolution, and 268 PPI pixel density. The multimedia experience is not great on this display, and viewing angles of this display disappointed me a lot. Touch response is smooth enough, and no glitch experienced while gaming or regular use. Overall the display is pretty mediocre, and the backlight is almost peeping out of the black color in the display when in full brightness. Sunlight visibility is also not very good even if you adjust the brightness to maximum. You can read the content on display (black on white background) but reading the name on call UI or recognizing the caller with the contact image is much difficult.
Touch response is smooth enough, and no glitch experienced while gaming or regular use.
Specifications
Coolpad Mega 3 comes with a 5.5 inches HD IPS LCD and 267 PPI pixel density. The primary and secondary camera are 8 MP each and with LED flash on both sides. It runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Cool UI layered on top which is upgradable for future Android versions. To process all the data, Coolpad added a 1.25 GHz quad-core MediaTek processor paired with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB ROM which is further expandable to 64 GB using SD card slot. To power all this hardware, a 3050 mAh nonremovable battery is included.
Software
The Mega 3 comes preloaded with Android 6.0 Marshmallow and layered with Coolpads official Cool UI. This Cool UI is similar to MIUI with no app drawer; you’ll get all your installed apps on the home screen only and to search for any app just swipe down on the home screen to bring up the search bar. The notification panel only contains the notifications and shows time, the quick settings toggles and brightness bar are in the control center.
Just like in Apple iOS, Cool UI also have a control center which you can access by swiping up from the bottom edge of the screen. You’ll get all the quick toggles, brightness bar and some shortcuts; it might be easier for those with small hands to adjust brightness and toggles quick settings with one hand. One More feature which is kind of borrowed from iOS is the C-Button which is a circular version of “Assistive Touch” containing some navigation buttons.
Camera
The camera euipped to the phone is 8 MP on both sides with LED flash too on both sides. The camera app is inspired by iOS, left-right swipe switches between different modes, live filter selector is located in the top right corner. There are two modes which we don’t see in every other smartphone are the Night Mode and Beauty Mode. Night mode is for low light conditions, but it didn’t come in handy while capturing low light pictures, check out the best picture that I captured using the Night Mode in the gallery.
Beauty mode recognizes faces in the viewfinder and tells the age (not exact), some sliders are provided In this mode to beautify the selfies and front facing LED flash does the rest of the job. The primary 8 MP rear shooter impressed me a lot, the pictures captured are not detailed enough, but the color reproduction is good. Check out the pictures which I captured using the rear camera in every mode possible.
Performance
Regarding performance, Coolpad Mega 3 is a little behind from most of the smartphone out there. With MediaTek processor and 2 GB RAM, the smartphone is able to run high-end games but with lags and low frame rate. The two GB RAM helps the smartphone to multitask several apps excluding games and browsers. Launching apps takes one or two seconds on the splash screen and then finally load up the app, games takes a lot of time to load stages and levels.
All this performance is because of the sleek Cool UI layered on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, you can multi-task maximum five apps properly. Well, it is not right to benchmark the smartphone but still, I did it and scores were below average. You can check them out below. The battery on Coolpad Mega 3 is 3050 but the performance is poor; I keep my phone connected to Wi-Fi all the time, and yes the battery discharges faster when connected to Wi-Fi. But in Coolpad Mega 3, Phone Idle is consuming more battery than the screen; I don’t know if it’s the software issue or the hardware issue.
Pros
- Three SIM slots
- Decent camera
- Front camera flash
Cons
- Plastic build
- Downfiring loudspeaker
- Poor battery
Verdict
Coolpad Mega 3 is a smartphone purely made for Indian needs and is useful for a person who needs to keep more than one SIM on standby; something an iPhone can’t do. This smartphone won’t disappoint you if you are not using it as a primary smartphone. Coolpad Mega 3 is available on online shopping portals for Rs. 6,999 and I only recommend you this smartphone if you want this for three SIM slots. Otherwise, there are other options by Coolpad.
