Lava Z92

The  Lava Z92 is all set to act as a bridge between budget phones and mid-range phones. Coming at a price, the Lava Z92 provides all the necessities demanded from a quality budget handset.

With decent performance, a comfortable design and stunning display, the Lava Z92 can deceive a customer with its low price. However, the phone does falter with its budget processor and camera, but that can be expected from a budget handset. Overall, the Lava Z92 is a decent handset meant for the budget audience.

The Lava Z92 is quite lightweight and sleek, making it settle in your palms comfortably. The curved sides are designed in a manner that it does not dig into the skin. Lava has made the back panel a little glossy, which also makes it a bit of a fingerprint magnet.

The fingerprint sensor is pressed at the back panel, and the position is quite ergonomic and comfortable to reach. The volume and power button is at the right, and the SIM tray is placed at the left. The volume button is well-placed too. The phone comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack and a loudspeaker grill at the bottom.

Even the dated Micro-USB port is placed at the bottom. The top of the phone is empty. The phone comes with Face recognition too.

The Lava Z92 arrives with a 6.22-inch display which has a HD+ resolution, getting around 720×1520 pixels. It is quite a dated resolution, but the phone comes with the latest aspect ratio of 19:9, which makes it quite impressive.

The colors on the phone are quite bright, but sometimes, they might appear a bit washed out. Due to the presence of bezels, you will not get enough screen space and hence, you will not be having an immersive experience promised by AMOLED bezel-free screens.

The phone also arrives with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 screen protector to keep the screen scratch free. The display is bright and provides excellent sunlight legibility, so you can use it properly outdoors too.

Being a budget phone, the Lava Z92 comes with an entry-level budget processor MediaTek Helio P22 chipset, which is the same that powered the budget Redmi 6. It is paired with 3GB RAM which is fine to multitask with a few apps running in the background but will start to slow down when you are running too many intensive apps.

Both the fingerprint scanner and the face recognition works fast, especially the face recognition being the quickest. Graphics-intensive games like PUBG will run at smooth preset and can still lag. Asphalt 8 can run at low settings. It gets 3587 multicore points, which are decent enough but will not give much advantage to the user.

The Lava Z92 comes with a 13MP camera with an f/2.0 aperture. In daylight, the exposure is quite right, and the phone offers excellent details. The Macros turn out to be quite good though the colors might look a bit artificial.

In low light, the phone tries to keep the graininess low in the images by keeping the shutter open for an extended period. However, due to this feature, there could be blurry shots, especially if your hand shakes a bit. For distant objects, there is a lack of proper definition around the edges.

In Studio mode, the phone was able to create a good bokeh effect, but it had average edge detection.

The 8MP selfie camera captures good details. You can also use Intelligent Selfie mode to make the shots come out better. For low light, the phone does not have a flash, but the screen can be used as a flash.

Video can be shot in 1080p, but due to lack of stabilization, it can turn out to be a bit shaky.

The Lava Z92 comes with a good juice pack of 3260mAh battery. It is not the most massive phone battery at this range, but it does deliver. With an HD video loop test, the phone was able to keep up to 12 hours and 30 minutes. Light use like Whatsapp, Google Maps, and snapping photos only saw that 54% was left. The phone charges reasonably fast and gets to 63% within an hour.

The Lava Z92 comes as a budget phone – and it provides what it promises. One of the main advantages of Lava Z92 is its camera, which performs well in both daylight and low-light situations. Macros turn out to be good too.

The performance is capable through the entry-level, and the phone may not attract you with its design. In general, this phone is not a bad one, but there are more capable phones present in the market. Some of its competitors worth considering at Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pro, Asus ZenFone Max Pro M1, and Nokia 5.1 Plus.