Lava Blaze Pro review: Made in India smartphone good for basic everyday use

Home-grown electronics brand Lava recently launched its second smartphone in the Blaze-series, the Lava Blaze Pro. Powered by the MediaTek Helio G37 processor, the smartphone is priced at Rs 9,999 – at par with rival smartphones powered by the same chip such as Motorola Moto G22 and Techno Spark 9. The smartphone brings a few upgrades to justify the ‘Pro’ moniker, but are they good enough? Let us find out

Design

The Lava Blaze Pro looks identical to its predecessor, the Lava Blaze, except it has a frosted glass back design. The phone’s frame is made of plastic with a smooth finish, which gets easily smudged with fingerprint marks. On the frame, there is a power button on the right, which doubles as a fingerprint scanner, and a volume button just above it. The button placement is appropriate, making one-handed operation comfortable.

Display and audio

The Lava Blaze Pro sports a 6.5-inch IPS HD+ screen of 90Hz refresh rate. The screen is bright, vivid and responsive. Considering the phone’s price, the screen quality and performance is acceptable. It is set to standard colour profile by default, but can be tuned for vivid and cool colours from display settings.

As for the audio, the phone has a mono speaker on the bottom side of the frame. It is loud and clear, but lacks clarity. The speaker delivers modest experience while watching videos, listening to music, and playing games. Besides the mono speaker, the Lava Blaze Pro has a 3.5mm audio out port for wired connectivity.

Camera

Imaging is covered by a triple-camera system on the back, featuring a 50-megapixel primary sensor, 2MP ultra-wide-angle sensor, and a 2MP mono lens. From a price-performance ratio, the rear camera system is good. However, do not expect quality output. The camera struggles with zoom. The zoomed shots show lack of details and there is visible noise across the frame. Moreover, the camera tends to artificially smoothen the frame in the post processing, resulting in loss of details. On the front, the phone has an 8MP camera sensor. It is good for selfies and video calls, but struggles in low-light conditions.

Performance and battery

The Lava Blaze Pro is powered by MediaTek Helio G37 system-on-chip, paired with up to 4GB RAM and 64GB on-board storage. The phone has a microSD card slot for storage expansion (up to 256GB). It boots Android 12 operating system with stock user interface free from bloatware and advertisements. From a price-performance perspective, the Lava Blaze Pro works well. It handles regular operation with ease and does not slow down even with 15 apps opened in the background.

As for the on-battery time, the smartphone survives a day of moderate usage with the screen set at 90Hz refresh rate. For battery saving, the refresh rate can be reduced to 60Hz from settings. The Lava Blaze Pro discharges quickly and gets warm when used for power-intensive tasks. The phone comes with a 10W charger, which takes about an hour to recharge a completely drained battery.

Verdict

The Lava Blaze Pro is not perfect, but it can do all things to an extent. The smartphone has a good display and clean user interface. Aside to these, there is barely anything to make it outshine its peers in its price segment Rs 9,999.