itel Mobile early this month launched their first handset of 2022, and I’ve to say it is a good handset. The phone in mention is the itel A58, and the company made a couple of improvements compared to its predecessor, the itel A56. itel Mobile Uganda’s Assistant Brand Manager, Henry Kijjo said the itel A58 is on par with what their consumers want, emphasizing that the company is sure that their customers will not be disappointed. Adding that the company paid close attention to its consumers’ needs.
Well, the company in one of the others did pay attention to customers’ needs as well as keep up with the smartphone trends. The upgrades on the phone include; a bigger display, a fashionable design, OS upgrade, and AI-powered Dual Cameras.
So the phone is an entry-level handset, that isn’t new but what does it have to offer,
1. Design, Display, and Build
The design and build are similar to its predecessor just a little bit of minor tweaks. The design and build a fashionable as advertised —the color variant available in the Ugandan market is starry black with a gradient-like finish. The phone is thick and heavy, the bezels a less which gives the phone a larger display, a 6.6-inch display coupled with a water-drop notch.
The phone has a standard design, the micro-USB port with a mouthpiece at the bottom, a 3.5mm standard earphone jack at the top, and the volume & power button on the right-side panel. At the back, a fingerprint sensor, dual AI-power camera, a single speaker grill, and the itel branding.
The A58 comes with a 6.6-inch display with a screen resolution of 1612 x 720 pixels and a 20:9 screen ratio. The resolution gives a clearer and more immersive visual experience compared to the itel A56 [a reason to get the itel A58 for the A56]. The screen is bright enough and can be adjusted according to the ambient light and a very good indoors and is quite legible outdoors even in direct sunlight. The phone’s display also supports a wide color gamut. You will surely enjoy your entertainment on this device, the colors are well presented for an entry-level budget phone —and first-time smartphone users should surely appreciate it.
2. Software, Performance, and Battery
The itel A58 comes with Android 11 (Go edition) mobile OS and comes with pre-installed GO apps that are lite to run smoothly on the 1GB RAM. A phone of this kind should run smoothly with lite version apps installed so to avoid lags or phone freeze. The phone is powered by a 1.3GHz Quad-core processor, along with Mali T820 MP1 GPU coupled with a 1GB RAM and onboard storage of 16GB which is expandable up to 64GB via microSD card.
While testing it, we received good results, performance was okay if the apps didn’t consume the 1GB RAM at once. A single app of a GB consumed almost the whole RAM, therefore we recommend using the phone with lite versioned apps or apps that are less than 1GB in size. Any app of your choice consuming less than 1GB best fits the phone. There were minimal results on multitasking [if apps didn’t consume half of the phone’s memory] with slightly heavy apps in the background and bad results giving numerous lags while using heavy apps
For battery life and charging;
The phone is powered by a non-removable 4,000mAh battery and it did a commendable job across all test scenarios including; video playback, calls, web browsing, and demonstrated long-lasting standby performance. The phone is equipped with an AI Power Master [as termed by the company] to intelligently optimize the phone’s battery life. The battery can get 2 extra hours on power-saving mode and up to 10 days in the ultra power-saving mode on a single charge. The phone does not support fast charging, so charging does take about 2 and half hours at most to fully charge.
3. Camera, Photo, and Video Quality
The A58 comes with a 5MP front-facing camera which is housed in the water-drop notch. And dual-rear AI camera with 5MP+QVGA sensors. The photos and videos you get from the cameras aren’t the best but average enough for an entry-level phone. With good lighting, mostly daylight settings, the photos, and videos did come out well, however, when zoomed in to clearly examine the photos mostly, there are not sharp enough.
Photo Quality;
Generally, the photos are averagely fine —the contrast and saturation are good for an entry-level phone, the noise doesn’t show if not zoomed in, and the excellent colors stay true to reality. The images aren’t that sharp but they are good enough to share/use for your preferred purposes. We noticed that the camera is set to automatically focus to take the photo, thus you have to be steady to take good shots to avoid blur.
So for photogenic, your photos with minimal or no edits will still look good and can be sharable on social networks as they are usually downscaled during the upload.
The selfie camera does produce good photos, with a ton of resolved detail, accurate colors, and high contrast.
Overall, the photo quality is okay.
Video Recording;
The video resolution for both the front and rear camera max out at 720p, well it is a downside that these cannot shoot up to 1080p (Full HD) —though the footage from both cameras is quite good. You have to be stable enough to have well-taken videos. With good lighting [esp. daylight] the video will have the colors remain accurate, they might be a blow in the highlights but the videos you get should be good enough for a phone of this type.
Our verdict
The itel A58 is an intriguing smartphone —packs great features for an entry-level phone. Well, the A-series should be one of the company’s best phones so far and they keep getting better for every successor that comes out even with minimal upgrades. So a budget phone like this would best fit first-time smartphones [beginners’ purchase]. With that in mind, we do believe itel consumers will be happy to try out this phone.
