Panasonic P100 Smartphone Review: An Alternative to Xiaomi Redmi 5A

The Panasonic is steadily watching the market trend and competition to change its smartphone quality. They are now trying to offer the best value for your money spending on the smartphone products. All of the Panasonic smartphones those launched so far in the last year are mostly overpriced; if you compared their specifications with other available smartphones fall under the same price range. Although, in the budget segment, the smartphone manufacturer leading in India is Xiaomi that offers the best value for money products, however, other companies also trying to compete, shoulder to shoulder.

The latest smartphone of Panasonic which is P100 launched in the month of Feb 2018 with a balanced specification at a budget price; but again somewhere the Xiaomi Redmi 5A again sweep the ground with a bit better specs and low price.

Here is the specs comparison: Panasonic P100 vs Xiaomi Redmi 5A

Let’s see bit more about the Panasonic P100. We have used it more than a week and here is our review…

 

Things Inside the Box of P100

• Handset
• Battery
• Charger
• USB Cable
• Protective Screen Guard
• Quick Start Guide
• Earphones
• Warranty Card

 

 Panasonic P100 Design

The Pansonic P100 is same as some entry-level Android device with all plastic body. However, the design of this budget phone gives a feel of some premium phone due to its polished and shiny back.  Our review unit was in a Blue color that looks much better than the golden one. Although, the glossy body of the P100 looks pretty, it also prone to fingerprint and dirt too. The fingerprint sensor and camera are placed upside down to each other.

The sides are curved makes it easy to handle. Back cover and battery are removable; the SIM card and microSD are also going to place inside the back cover. The weight of the device is 174.8 g which is bit heavier than some of the other smartphones available in the segment.

The 3.5mm jack is at the top while bottom space uses the micro USB 2.0 with OTG support. The front features 5.0 inches IPC LCD, hardware capacitive touch navigation button (below) and ear speaker, front flash, and camera along sensor placed at the top of the display.

Display

Just like Redmi 5A, the Panasonic P100 also features an ideal size of 12.7 cm (5-inch) with HD resolution (720 x 1280 pixels) and pixel density of 294 ppi.  For protection, it uses the 2.5D curved screen with Corning Gorilla Glass (version unknown).  For a budget smartphone, this display specification seemed fair.

The images appear and text appears enough crisp and bold to read easily in the bright light. And also the color reproduction you can see in the above image is natural but not much vivid or saturated, however, you get what you pay for. The viewing angles are great too.

Performance

Panasonic P100 packed with MediaTek MT6737 Quad-core 1.25 GHz Cortex-A53 while on the other hand, the Xiaomi Redmi 5A has Qualcomm MSM8917 Snapdragon 425 SOC with Quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A53 CPU.

The Pansonic P100 is available in two variants one is 2GB and the other one is 1GB; reset of all specs in both are same including the CPU. If you talk about the storage, it has 16GB internal ROM that can be expanded further up to 128GB using the microSD card slot. The good thing the phone has a separate slot for SIMs and micro SD card means there is  Hybrid card restrictions.

We got the 2GB RAM model for review, so the performance verdict will according to that; however, we recommend to go for 2GB, if you are planning to buy this because there is not much difference in the price.

Performance wise the Panasonic P100 did a good job and proved itself a decent performance in terms of gaming, photography, and security. The fingerprint sensor works really fine and recognize the finger and unlock the device with just in one tap. In terms of security, the P100 beats the Redmi 5A because it doesn’t have the fingerprint sensor.

While doing multitasking and everyday tasks from some casual user perspective the device is fine, but when you start pushing it out of its limit it starts getting lags and giving slow movements. Also, the high-end graphics game performance is not that much smoother, as it has to be… One more thing which we want to talk about is heating; While using the phone there was no heating issue in normal conditions but you can find a bit in gaming and photography. Thanks to its plastic cover which not let you fell any kind of uncomfortableness.

But if you see the phone from its price point of view, what the Panasonic p100 offers it should be acceptable…

Coming to the battery which is 2200 mAh and it really going to disappoint you because its close competitor Redmi 5A offers 3000 mAh. The battery backup is good if you have not much call flow or other usages. But the power users those do lots of chatting and browsing on the phone need to have to carry the charger along because it going to be drained fast.

 

Antutu, Geekbench, and 3D Mark benchmark scores

 

 

 

 

Hardware

Unlike most of the phones those using the Hybrid SIM card tray, the Pansonic P100 offers a dedicated SIM and microSD card slots. It uses nano-SIM card. The sensors offer by the phone are Fingerprint, accelerometer, and proximity.

The GPU used by the phone is Mali-T720 and out of 16GB storage, the 11.2GB is available for usage. For connectivity, it has Bluetooth, GPS, OTG support, WiFi, Hotspot and WiFi Direct.

 

 

Camera

On the rear side, the phone feature 8MP autofocus camera while selfie it has 5MP fixed focus. We already did a detail review article on the Panasonic P100 camera with picture samples, please have a look: Camera Review with Image Samples.

 

Software

The Panasonic P100 runs on the Android 7.0 Nougat with a stock interface that also helps the phone to work smoothly. It comes with several pre-installed applications such Opera Mini, News Point, Google Tez, Hike Messanger, KGallery and more…

To increase the phone’s usability it has multiple gestures control placed under the option Smart Suite inside the Phone’s Settings. 

In the Smart Suite option you will find following features:

Pocket Mode: It increases the ringtone when the phone rings inside your pocket.

Double tap to Wake:  Under the Smart wakeup you will find this option which activates the display with the double tap on it without pressing any buttons.

Intelligent Operations

1. Flip to Mute: Just Flip the phone to make silent without touching any button.

2. Smart Dial:  It can use to call someone by picking up the phone and placing it on your ear without pressing buttons.

3. Smart Answer: It allows to take calls without swiping the screen when mobile is placed new the ear. It uses the proximity sensor.

Face Unlock

You use your face to unlock the device. The phone has Trust Face Mode that registers the user face to unlock the smartphone when your hands are not free.

Safety Features

1. The Bluetooth Unlock Mode is for automatically unlocking the smartphone when it detects a trusted Bluetooth device.

2. It also has an On-Body-Detection Mode that does not allow your smartphone to sleep when you’re holding it, but when you put it away the phone locks itself.

3. It has a Trusted Places feature in which you can assign trusted places to your phone. For example car or your home and as soon as the phone detect the marked places, it will automatically be unlocked the device.

One can restrict the background running of any app using the Duraspeed in-built feature that helps to save data and battery.

 

 Panasonic P100 Picture Gallery

Pricing and final thoughts

The Price of Panasonic P100 1GB model is ₹ 5,299 and 2GB comes at ₹ 5,999. The prices of the variants are reasonable if you see the specs offered by the P100. It is the first Pansonic budget smartphone that seems value for money product at least to me. Overall, the specs and performance are acceptable but the battery proved a downside of the phone. Because if you are going to compare it with the Xiaomi Redmi 5A that comes at the same price ₹ 5,999 with better battery and camera. But most of the time Redmi 5A is not in the stock; at that time the Panasonic is the best alternative if you looking for a basic Android Smartphone on a budget price amongst others.