Lyf F1 Review | Price, Specifications, and more
Lyf F1 design and build.
The Lyf F1 is built around a plastic frame and, it feels very light to hold. Despite going with plastic over metal, the overall fit and finish is good. There's no creaking or flex when the body is pressed, though we would still have preferred a sturdier material. The dimpled texture on the back adds some relief to the phone's otherwise ordinary look. The Lyf F1 is quite slim too at 7.9mm.
There’s a 5.5-inch full-HD screen that has good brightness and sharp text, thanks to the dense pixel count. Colour reproduction is fairly good too and there’s Corning Gorilla Glass for reinforcement. We have the power and volume buttons on the right, which have decent tactile response. There are two slots on the left for two SIM cards and we even have a dedicated microSD card slot (up to 128GB). The headphones socket is placed on the top, and a Micro-USB port is at the bottom.
Around the back, we simply have the camera module at the top and a slit for the speaker at the bottom. There is no fingerprint sensor, which is a bit of a disappointment. In the box, you get an in-ear headset, a power adapter, a long flat USB cable, and a SIM ejector tool.
Lyf F1 specifications and features
Lyf F1 design and build
The Lyf F1 is built around a plastic frame and, it feels very light to hold. Despite going with plastic over metal, the overall fit and finish is good. There's no creaking or flex when the body is pressed, though we would still have preferred a sturdier material. The dimpled texture on the back adds some relief to the phone's otherwise ordinary look. The Lyf F1 is quite slim too at 7.9mm.
There’s a 5.5-inch full-HD screen that has good brightness and sharp text, thanks to the dense pixel count. Colour reproduction is fairly good too and there’s Corning Gorilla Glass for reinforcement. We have the power and volume buttons on the right, which have decent tactile response. There are two slots on the left for two SIM cards and we even have a dedicated microSD card slot (up to 128GB). The headphones socket is placed on the top, and a Micro-USB port is at the bottom.
Around the back, we simply have the camera module at the top and a slit for the speaker at the bottom. There is no fingerprint sensor, which is a bit of a disappointment. In the box, you get an in-ear headset, a power adapter, a long flat USB cable, and a SIM ejector tool.
Lyf F1 specifications and features
Lyf has used the fairly dependable octa-core Snapdragon 617 SoC for the F1. It's paired with 3GB of RAM, and there’s 32GB of built-in storage. Other specifications include Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, USB OTG, GPS, FM radio, and 4G VoLTE support. Apart from the usual suite of sensors, the F1 also features a gyroscope.
We have Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 which is thankfully left to its stock look and feel. Reliance bundles the Jio suite of apps, including JioMoney, Jio Play, etc. The apps require you to create an account, or if you’re using a Jio SIM, you can skip this step. Lyf Care lets you find nearby service centres, call a helpline, and manage Jio’s services.
The Smart Tray app provides you with a pop-up tray of shortcuts for up to 15 apps when you swipe diagonally from either of the bottom corners of the screen. Smart Ring alters the volume level of an incoming call based on gestures like flip to mute, or based on ambient sound. In our experience, the success rate was a bit of a hit-or-miss. The video player lets you stack two videos side-by-side and have them play simultaneously. While we can't imagine anyone needing to do this regularly, the feature exists.
Performance
General performance is good and we didn’t encounter any major hiccups during the course of our review. The phone's core specifications and the lean Marshmallow UI help ensure that performance and multitasking are smooth. The phone doesn’t overheat, but its back does get warm when you’re using the camera a lot or doing anything stressful, like gaming. Speaking of which, even heavy games like Asphalt 8 ran smoothly, without much trouble. We got 47,562 in AnTuTu, 5,390 in 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme, and 17fps in GFXbench. These are more or less along the lines of what we expect from a phone at this price point.
The Lyf F1 does a decent job at media playback too. It can handle files up to 1080p with ease and even our high-bitrate test files ran just fine. The speaker gets sufficiently loud when placed on a flat surface, but sounds a bit weak otherwise and gets muffled pretty easily if the phone is placed on an uneven surface. Audio quality with the bundled headset is strictly average.
The 3200mAh battery ran for 10 hours and 57 minutes in our HD video loop test, which is good. With regular use, we easily got through a full day and then some. The battery charges pretty quickly with the bundled adapter and we were able to get up to 45 percent in about an hour.
Verdict
The ergonomic design of the Lyf F1 makes it easy to use and carry around. The back offers good grip when you hold it and the slim borders on either side of the display offer some degree of one-handed usability. There’s no camera bump on the back either.
As it turns out, the Lyf F1 is indeed a decent option to c
