Centric L3 Review: Budget beauty with latest features, fingerprint scanner

Domestic smartphone maker Centric came up with another latest smartphone, L3, under the sub-Rs 8,000 segment in India. The Centric L3 houses every latest feature a budget buyer would look out for and it is also one of the few phones that come with a fingerprint scanner at this price range. 

Priced at Rs 6,399, the phone is decent looking, much better than its predecessor G1, which came with a few rough edges. The Centric brand is owned by Mumbai-based Priyanka Telecom. 
 

Business Standard reviewed the Centric L3 to test its overall performance. Here are our observations: 
 

Design: 
 

Centric L3 sports a plastic unibody with a glossy back and curved edges for easy grip. Apart from the camera and LED flash, the back is pretty clean and smooth, which makes it easier to handle eben with one hand.

In the front, the smartphone has a physical home button equipped with a fingerprint sensor on the 5 inch IPS display. The right side houses the power and volume buttons. Micro USB and 3.5mm audio port are at the top and the single speaker at the bottom. 

The back cover of the phone is removable and comes with both SIM slots and the microSD card slot once the cover is removed.Apart from these, the phone is average looking and light and easy to hold. 
 

Display: 

The Centric L3 a 5-inch HD IPS display (1280 x 720 pixels) with 2.5D curved glass on top, which is bright enough for day-to-day use both indoors and outdoors. The phone in maximum brightness provides a decent and sharp display outdoors and works just great in indoor lightings. The colours on the screen are not too sharp that may irritate the eye and not too dull to make one unable to see in the outdoors.  
 

Software and Performance: 
 

The Centric L3 runs on Andoid Nougat and it almost acts like a stock Android with a few customisations, which thankfully does not hinder its performance much.
 

Apart from that, the device is powered by MediaTek MT6737, a quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz. We got the 2 GB RAM variant with 16 GB internal memory expandable by up to 256GB using a microSD card, which gave a decent performance.

The fingerprint scanner however, turned out to be a big disappointment. It lagged most of the times and sometimes did not recognise the fingerprint at all. There were times when the phone didn’t respond to the fingerprint scanning for a couple of seconds. 
 

As mentioned above, the company has preinstalled its own apps called Centric Care and Centric Store, as well as SwiftKey Keyboard, but this does not add to the bloatware much, which is a relief. 
 

Performance wise, the phone works in a range of smooth to laggy from time to time. The 2 GB RAM definitely bogs down the speed and performance and the entry-level processor adds to it. Multitasking it a tough task as the phone either hangs up from time to time or kills kills apps in the background to free up RAM.
 

This definitely means that high-end gaming is not much of an option here. Games tend to lag and also heated the device, apart from longer load times.
 

The Google Now launcher works comparatively smooth and the phone’s performance seemed satisfactory with almost no lags during casual usage. However, certain heavy apps like Facebook and also camera-centric apps like Snapchat and Instagram significantly slowed down the phone, which is understandable considering the chipset. 
 

Battery: 
 

The Centric L3 has a 3050mAh non-removable battery, which pushed itself for one day with light usage. On heavy usage, the phone got discharged by the end of the day. 
 

Moreover, the phone comes with a normal USB charger that times usual two or two and a half hours to get fully charged. However, the phone has an Intelligent Power Saving mode which helps it conserve power when idle.
 

Camera: 

The Centric L3 houses a 13MP rear camera with LED flash that does a decent job at capturing images. The photos lose out heavily on details, get overexposed in daylight and come almost with an artificial feel to it.

The 5MP selfie camera takes average selfies and comes with a set of almost outdated beauty modes. There are no in latest selfie features such as in depth effect, blur effect or beautify modes. 
 

 Video quality is also just average, and starts to get pixelated at 720p for both the primary and the selfie cameras. Overall, the camera features are not built for the selfie lovers or photographers. 
 

Verdict: 
 

The Centric L3 a promising smartphone in the market and highly recommended for those looking for an affordable device with latest specifications and fingerprint scanner. Priced at Rs 6,399, the domestic smartphone maker Centric has come up with one of the most affordable phones at such an inexpensive price. The smartphone comes with bevy of features that may please those looking for a budget phone with a packed performance.