SKK Hyper X Blade Review - An Android iPhone On A Limited Budget!

They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery. Apple has been a leader in aesthetic design and there have been a long list of companies that tried to draw inspiration from Apple. With the new Hyper X Blade, SKK just solidified themselves in that long list but with a sub-4K price point. Is it as good as it looks? Let's find out!

The inspirations are obvious!

For the review part 1: SKK Hyper X Blade Unboxing And First Impressions - Familiar Looks, Premium Feel!

Display Quality

Look at those deep shades of orange!

The HyperX Blade (HXB) has a 10 point 5 inch in cell HD display with an 1280 x 720 resolution at 320 ppi which is okay at this price point. The brightness and the viewing angles are very good while the readability is low when under bright sunlight.

There's 10 points of touch for better typing accuracy and swiping control!

The colors are vibrant and accurate but the 2.5D glass at certain angles gains glare that shine through every now and then. An anti-reflective coating could have helped.

It's good in the eyes and superb to touch for the price!

One gripe we had with the display is that the edges tend to be brighter than the rest of the screen. You notice it at first but you get used to it.

Audio Quality

It's just superb to touch!

The HyperX Blade carries a single speaker below which we think is one of the better speaker placements at this price point. 

The sound quality is not that great. The sound has decent volume  where there is no distortion at max volume, but the sound falls flat. The highs, lows and mids are muddled and we could not distinguish them.

For the headphone out, the SQ is an improvement over the speaker. The volume, power, clarity are acceptable for this segment. The separation of the lows, highs and mids are passable but do not expect a pair of Hi-Fi earphones will help improve the sound quality.

For the microphone, it performs well for calls, but do not expect it to be clear for audio recordings.

Battery Life

4 hours and 4 minutes!

It packs a 2,700 mAh battery with a 5 inch HD screen made us less optimistic about the battery life and the benchmarks yielded 4hours of on screen time which is not that great. In fact, the real life battery with the usual calls, texts, chrome browsing, youtube watching and spotify, the battery would only last 3 to 5 hours. We wanted more given that it was nearing the 3000 mAh mark!

Charging is fast, but the battery life isn't long.

Charging time takes two hours which is standard for a non-flagship, non-fast charging compatible phone. A great thing about this phone is that we never experienced heating issues while charging, gaming, benchmarking or web browsing.

Camera

That camera bump!

The phone does not have its own camera app. We had to use the google camera app for our test which meant very little features. It only has panorama, video and stills. Flash, grid guides and timer are present but nothing else. There isn't even any exposure compensation.

We were not too happy about the camera performance of the Hyper X Blade. There is no manual mode, or a way to control the ISO which resulted in the mandatory use of the flash for the primary camera to reduce noise. Most of our low-light / indoor pics below will show blown out highlights or washed out pictures because of the inaccurate auto ISO adjustments. This also results in low color reproduction and low depth rendition.

Rear Camera Samples

Dayiight shot

Trying some against the light stills

Indoor shot

Struggled in this close up shot

No flash vs with flash

The 5 MP secondary camera renders grainy, soft images even on bright conditions. In low light the noise is acceptable but the pictures are also flat and washed out.

For videos, it can take 1080p videos at the back with decent picture quality and 480p videos with a lot of grains in front. Both aren't that desirable to use if you don't have a tripod as the output will be shaky.

Performance

The UI of SKK Hyper X Blade

With the standard of 1 GB, you can multitask a bit with this phone but there is some noticeable lag when multiple apps are running in the background or when you have multiple tabs in Chrome. The phone itself runs at a passable rate. It isn't the snappiest and it isn't the smoothest experience we've had. It's just passable.

We wanted to like the performance but...

The 10 point multi touch panel made this phone promising for gaming but our experience wasn't very good because Asphalt 8 was already at the 'very low' setting and we would still experience frame rate drops, aliasing, and lags when playing.

We wanted to like the performance of this phone so we tried watching 720p at 60 fps videos on YouTube and there were noticeable stuttering almost every 2 to 3 seconds of playback. The app itself would lag while browsing YouTube while watching the 720p 60 fps video on picture on picture mode.

In terms of UI,  it is running a near stock Android 5.1 Lollipop OS with almost no bloatware. It is also light, responsive and simple, however it is missing apps like the camera app and the standard google apps like drive, gmail and the like.

Connectivity such as WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth, GPS, GSM, and calls works well. There's just no USB OTG support for easy file transfers and etc.

Pros - Looks like an iPhone, good display viewing angles and color reproduction

Cons - Looks like an iPhone, battery life should improve, camera could be better, Audio is flat, low performance

Verdict

For us, the SKK Hyper X Blade is more style than substance,  we can only recommend this phone for people who want to have the looks of the iPhone at a cheaper price. Other than that we almost can not find a great thing about this phone. We would rather recommend the cheaper Chronos Ace+ with more value for your money!

GIZ Rating: 2.75/5 Stars