--BY  SUSHIL PANGENI

Gaget lovers in the recent years have become fatigued with the similar design pattern of smartphones of various brands. It seems that smartphone manufacturers are running out of designs irrespective of their standard. In this Android jungle, an US-based smartphone producer, Obi Worldphones, has come up with a fresh design-led proposition concept with top notch hardware and software performances. Rejuvenated as Obi Worldphones from Obi Mobiles, it has come up with a distinctly designed, affordable Android-based SF1 smartphone to strike the Nepali market.

With their very first offering to Nepali customers, the Obi has presented an incredible phone at its price outfitting the competition with very few drawbacks. The phone feels premium from the very first touch. When it comes to design, it’s the part where SF1 stands the strongest.  With its elevated screen or ‘Floating Display’, the phone looks stunning and stands out in the crowd. Impressive plastic casing and two metal accents on top and bottom of the phone gives great feeling on holding.  As the phone has oleophobic coating over the gorilla glass protected screen, the screen does not hold the finger prints. 

If you care concerned about the display, it’s something more interesting in SF1. SF1 comes with 5-inch FHD display with 1080*1920 screen resolution and pixel density of 443 ppi. The phone has sharp screen that captures 95 percent color spectrum so images are true-to-life and bursting with vibrant, accurate color and tone. Powered by a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 64-bit octa-core processor, the 147 grams smartphone comes coupled with 3GB of LPDDR RAM and 32GB of internal storage that is expandable up to 64GB via the micro-SD card slot. The Qualcomm processor provides fast, reliable and powerful offerings to the users for effortless multitasking, smooth video streaming and responsive gaming at their fingertips. The phone does not heat up even on long running. Nevertheless, the Lifespeed UI is one of the drawbacks of the phone. Despite being the most unique and attractive Android interface, ‘Lifespeed’ is tad sluggish which we hope the company will overcome in with the upcoming updates.   

Apart from the design, camera features make this phone a standout in this price range. The Obi SF1 comes with 13MP camera (Sony IMX214) with an f/2.0 aperture and shoots 1080p video. It comes with a unique Re-Focus feature. The Re-Focus technology captures images with five different layers of depth of field so you can refocus an image, even after the photo’s been taken. Taking selfies can be awesome with 5MP front camera with the flash. The rear camera also has the flash. This Obi smartphones features more goodies in camera software with UbiFocus a dynamic focus mode, OptiZoom a multi-frame super-resolution photos that mimics an optical zoom and the color-preserving Chroma Flash. The images taken in daylight are awesome and you get the feeling of actually using 13 MP camera. However, pictures taken at low-light are not really good.

 Running on Android 5.0.2 and customized with the Obi Lifespeed user interface, Obi Worldphone SF1 is embedded with 3,000 mAh Li-Po battery. It comes with additional quick charge 1.0 facility for those who prefer quick charging.

For the audiophiles, this is the phone they would like to grab on. Sound is awesome in this phone. As soon as you put on the headphones and turn on the Dobly Audio application, you find something very different and engaging in the quality of sound. 

Starck Tech, a subsidiary of Jyoti Group has brought the Worldphones in Nepali market. Two models SF1 in two variants 2GB RAM with 16 GB internal and 3 GB RAM with 32 GB internal storage are available in the market. SF1 is priced Rs 21,599 for the 2GB RAM/16GB internal memory version and Rs 26,199 for the 3GB RAM/32GB internal memory variant.