Kult Impulse review: Under-powered processor fails to power up this device

The Kult Impulse is a mediocre budget smartphone with good battery life and decent camera; the phone's weak performance diminishes the utility to a great extent

Home-grown smartphone brand Kult recently launched the 18:9 aspect ratio screen-based Kult Impulse at Rs 8,999. The phone features a 4000 mAh battery, which lasts almost 2 days on regular usage. Powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core MediaTek MTK6739 processor, paired with 32GB internal storage and 3GB of RAM, the phone feels slightly underpowered, especially when compared to counterparts in the same segment, such as Xiaomi Redmi 5.

In terms of performance, the phone seems to lag when multiple apps are running in the background. As for the graphics, the phone faces performance issues while running graphic-intensive games such as Need for Speed No Limits and Tekken, and even the casual not-so-heavy games such as Subway Surfers and Angry Birds Classic.

The phone boots Android Nougat 7.1.1 out of the box and the user interface is almost stock, with only a few bloatware apps installed. The user interface is reminiscent of the Moto G4 Plus and Moto C Plus experience due to a vanilla Android interface.

The phone sports a 3.5mm headphone jack, but it does not come bundled with headphones inside the box. The dual-SIM smartphone features a dedicated dual-SIM and microSD card slot. It supports 4G and VoLTE, but one SIM at a time.

The Kult Impulse sports a 5.99-inch HD+ screen in the 18:9 aspect ratio. Although it provides ample screen estate for immersive multimedia playback experience, such as watching videos on YouTube and online movies streaming on Amazon Prime, the lethargic processor and underoptimised RAM management spoils the experience.

In terms of imaging, the Kult Impulse sports a 13-megapixel camera on the front and back, featuring a dedicated LED flash. The rear camera takes decent photos in day light, but struggles in low-light conditions. Particularly, the beauty mode is not very effective in low light. The front camera, on the other hand, is satisfactory and takes decent selfie shots.

As for utility, the device sports a fingerprint sensor and face-unlock mechanism for device safety. Both the security mechanisms work optimally, but the face unlock feature fails to work in low-light conditions.

Verdict

The Kult Impulse is a mediocre budget smartphone with good battery life and decent camera performance. At Rs 8,999, the phone competes with Xiaomi Redmi 5, Infocus Vision 3 and Honor 7A. But the phone’s performance is weak, and a decent processor with better software optimisation and RAM management would have made a lot of a difference to the performance.