Every other mobile company today has its own version of a budget smartphone. They’re majorly targeting a consumer base that does not seem to care about specs, performance, graphics, frames-per-second, and all that jazz. All they want is the best phone to fit their budget. And mobile vendors like Xiaomi have come up with phones that are extremely well priced in this category, but at the same time deliver on specs and performance.

Now a US based software company InFocus – have recently stepped in the Indian smartphone scene with the ‘M2’. Interestingly, it’s a high-specification, budget smart-phone; at a crazy-low price tag of Rs. 4,999 available exclusively at SnapDeal.com.

Here’s my experience with the InFocus M2.

Call Quality

I’ve used a Nexus 5 for comparison, and the call quality of InFocus M2 is surprisingly better. This goes to prove that, big smart phones don’t always do the most important job very well; that of being a good phone. The call quality was crisp, and you not have to be very close to the speaker to be audible at the other end. Even while travelling on densely populated loud roads of Mumbai, the phone fares very well at noise reduction.

Messaging

The InFocus M2 does not come bundled with 3rd party keyboards like Swype. So until you setup your phone and choose to download one, you have to rely on the default keyboard. Which is a real pain to use. The keys are small, and their detection areas often seem to overlap. This will result in you making a lot of errors, which turns out to be really frustrating.

The autocorrect works as expected, and gives quick, accurate results. On default settings, I typed gibberish on the Nexus 5, and the keyboard defaults to the closest correct word. But Infocus M2 will provide all the closest options, and will default to what you have typed. This is not necessarily bad if you’re typing something native, in english.

Camera

The camera on InFocus M2 is somewhat of a disappointment. The InFocus M2 comes with an 8 MP rear and 8 MP front camera. That’s nice, but only on paper. The camera sensor is decent and the effort required to click a stable picture is monumental. 8 out of 10 photos I clicked were at least a bit blurry. When stacked up against a powerful Nexus 5, the camera falls short in more ways than one. The noise is evident in every photo, and while you won’t be able to call it a bad camera, it certainly misses out on all the important details.

Flash on the InFocus M2 is a monster. Every dark image is illuminated enough to make it look as if it was almost taken in daylight. This is another thing that the Nexus 5 can learn from such budget phones. The response time for photos in daylight is really good. The camera comes bundled with a host of useful features like smile detection, zero shutter delay, GPS location information; all handy additions which make for an overall decent camera package, “if” you can manage to get a still shot.

Video Camera

Compared to the still camera, the video camera of InFocus M2 gives much more stability. Though blur is always evident, the pain of shooting non-blurry photos is gone. The response time is quick, yet again.

Gaming

The surprise factor of the phone is it’s incredible performance. One may judge a phone’s performance by how fast and responsive it is, but all expectations sail low when there’s cheap phone on hand. But this is where InFocus M2 surprises, shocks and pleases! The first game I loaded up was Injustice: Gods Among Us. Though not a looker (as most mobile games fail to be), Injustice is a very power hungry game. And the InFocus tames it just the same. I loaded up Riptide Gp2, which is used for game benchmarks all over the world, and the InFocus handled it with ease as well. Every game I played made me feel as if i’m playing it on my Nexus 5, and this speaks volumes about the performance of the InFocus M2’s GPU.

Software

History shows us, that every Apple competitor tries to copy Apple in some way. It might be the curved edges, unibody design, the style statement, the camera; everyone tries to have a part of Apple in whatever phones they own. As such, the InFocus does not stray away from the trend. But InFocus M2’s attempt at copying Apple’s aesthetics is a bit unique. The default launcher has no menu for apps. Every Android phone till date has had a menu, where all the apps are stacked. But InFocus M2 strays away from such. Any app you download will be stacked on the home screen on a separate page. You’ll have to swipe left of right to find and access it. This reduces the complexity and gets right down to the point; not a bad thing to have. But Android does not feel like Android without the home menu. It feels like a mix breed of Apple and Nokia to be honest.