Prestigio might not be a name you know well.
The company is new to the UK smartphone
market, though it is established elsewhere in
the world. It has recently launched the MultiPhone
5430, an average-sized Android device with a
4.3-inch screen that sits inside a body that’s made
from slightly creaky plastic. The front has a minimal
design, the sides are characterised by an
inoffensive silvery plastic strip, but the back is not
to our liking. The large gaudy branding logo and
fl ashy patterning give off a bit more of the budget
vibe than we like to see. That 4.3-inch screen offers
960 x 540 pixels. Text is crisp, but not super-sharp,
and viewing angles are good.
The Prestigio MultiPhone 5430 has a point of
immediate interest in its specifi cations as it sports
an Intel processor. Now, it isn’t ploughing an
entirely new furrow here. We’ve seen Intel
processors in handsets before. But they remain
something of a rarity, and much as Intel might want
to push its way into the lucrative smartphone
market, progress has been slow.
What we have here is an Atom Z2420 running at
1.2GHz. It has a single core, which might immediately make it sound old hat. But this is a
relatively new processor, and it includes hyperthreading.
This technological wizardry caters for a
virtual rather than a real second core, enabling the
processor to work faster when it needs to, just as a
multi-core processor does.
We didn’t feel the processor held the handset
back at all – it responded well to fi nger presses and
swipes, webpages resolved quickly enough and
video played without stuttering. We can’t see why
anyone should avoid the Prestigio MultiPhone 5430
because of the processor choice. Although,
equally, the Intel Inside logo on the back doesn’t
constitute a selling point either. With 1GB of RAM,
the all-round performance was adequate, while
never pushing the boundaries.
There’s only 4GB of storage built in and this is far
from the whole story as there’s just 1GB free for
your own use. That’s not even enough to store
some larger apps like games, so perhaps it is a
blessing that the handset is equipped with Android
4.0. True, this is far from the leading edge, but at
least you can store apps on a micro SD card.
Prestigio also gives you the option when you set
the phone up not to include some apps it
considers you might like to have. You can opt to
install – or not – an eReader that’s also a portal for
purchasing eBooks, Evernote and the MobiSystems Offi ce Suite. Leaving those off
should save space, and we welcome the fact that
they are optional, when so many manufacturers
install countless – and often unremovable – extras
whether you want them or not.
The micro SD card slot isn’t accessible until you
remove the battery, so if you are into hotswapping
music or video to your smartphone this isn’t going
to be the ideal phone for you.
Prestigio has not skinned Android 4.0, so you get
the Vanilla Android experience. That’s fi ne by us.
Android has not been left entirely alone, though.
There’s an FM radio built in, and the Android
standard keyboard has been augmented with a
Prestigio alternative that has a number row. We like
this – it beats long pressing keys.
As if to counter the pleasant keyboard there’s a
bit of shutter lag in the eight-megapixel main
camera, which is a bit annoying if you are trying to
photograph a moving subject.
Actually, ‘a bit annoying’ isn’t a bad way to sum
this handset up. It does have its good points, and
the Intel processor is not a bad thing. But there’s
not enough internal memory, sound quality through
the speakers is not great and the design lacks
strong appeal. Even the fact that the handset ships
with a sleeve-style case doesn’t really draw it out
from the realm of the average.