Customer reviews for Star A919 3G WCDMA Android Dual Sim 4.3"WVGA Dual Core(650M+400M)

  
by torvug
March 11, 2012
STAR A919 Review   (from: ?)
I bought this phone a couple of weeks ago. It works smooth and in my opinion it has a nice and functional design. However, there are a few things that one has to be aware of.

The plastic back cover design is poor. It is very easy to break it during the opening and you can be sure it will get damaged after 10 to 20 openings. If you need to play often with your SIMs don't buy this model.

The power switch doesn't seem very robust and you have to use it each time you want to get awake your phone. I am scared about the reliability here but for now works well.

The 8MPixel camera is not brilliant in low light and the LED flash is not bright enough to solve the problem. It will also have problems with the default android camera application. You will need to search for a different application in order to get the best from it. I am using Vignette and Camera360 that take nice pictures with good light. It is not clear to me how the autofocusing works. Some pictures are not well focused. It might be that the autofocus is simply not there and you just have a fixed depth of field to stay within if you want a nice picture. I will need to play more with it in order to understand, I think for the same reason the barcode scanners do not work on this phone.

The magnetic field sensor is not present so all the compass apps or any other based on will not work.
Accelerometer:present; Linear accel: present; Gravity sens:present; Gyroscope:not present; rotation: not present; Orientation (pitch and roll): not present; Light sens:not present (this is why if you set the screen brightness on Auto it will drain your battery).

If you keep it awake for 4 to 5 hours in order to play with apps and settings and internet you will have to recharge.

All the rest works very well. The connectivity of all kinds (WiFi, 3G, GPS, Bluetooth) is very good. The touchscreen also, is sensitive and fast, offering very good image resolution, luminosity and contrast. There is plenty of android apps to play with that are working very well.

However if you open too many apps the phone will get slower and occasionally android will crash (it happened a couple of times in 2 weeks of intensive use). This might be related to the application itself or to the combination android and the peculiar hardware of the phone. I didn't have time to investigate.

However, in my opinion, this is a good smart phone but a little bit too expensive (even discounted of 15%) for its features and its quality. As usually you can give higher or lower votes depending upon what you have in mind to do with it.

I am located in the European Comunity and I had to pay 50Euro over the Lightinthebox price as custom various taxes.

Reply:
Thanks for your comment.