So, we reviewed the AG Mobile Style

TL:DR

The AG Mobile Style does the simple things well, and that makes it a decent option for anyone looking for an Android phone with little fuss, without having to spend a ton of money. I wasn’t terribly impressed with its performance when I put it through more complex tasks, and there were a few aesthetic decisions that struck me as weird. But considering it’s price point, and by extension, target demographic, there’s really not much more to expect from it. The AG Mobile Style is…adequate.

(^_^)

What’s in the box?

the device.
in-ear headphones.
micro-USB cable + electric plug.
three back covers; white, matte-black and blue.
transparent protective cover
phone manual + warranty card

Design

Style. When you christen a phone, “Style”, you’ve set a pretty high standard for yourself, right off the bat. Has AG Mobile met this standard? I’m not sure. But to be fair, I think the phone does look really good in parts. Especially with the matte-black case, on.

Device — I think the matte-black case looks best.

And people seem to agree with me. When I carried it around, I got a few questions and compliments, but there are a couple of chinks in its otherwise impenetrable armor. Err…there’s a curve across the bottom end of the front face of the device.

What on earth is that curve doing there? — Why?

I’m a minimalist, as far as device design goes. I think form follows function, and this curve feels more like a gimmick, than anything else. It doesn’t look like it serves any purpose, asides from making a pretty phone, prettier. Except that it doesn’t make this pretty phone any prettier. The top edge, screen borders and the bottom edge of the phone all establish a certain symmetry. The curve upsets that paradigm, and as a result, keeps drawing attention to itself.

DOGE-614x307 — “Hey, look at me. I’m a curve. All curved, and shit. Very Style. Much aesthetic.”

Earlier today, I handed the phone to my friend, Chioma, and asked her to open it. The first thing she did, after giving it a good look, was try to slide it open. Funny, I did the exact same thing, when I first took it out of the case. Seeing the curve leads you to believe that the back cover slides downwards, when you need to open it up. Nope. I found out the hard way, that you need to stick a fingernail in-between the cover, and the body of the device, then slowly make your way around it, until it’s all come off. Hardly the best possible execution. It’s made that much more challenging, because the back cover, instead of just covering the back, now hugs the front of the phone, too. You’re forced to strike a balance between spending aeons, trying to pry the cover open gently, on one hand, and on the other, snapping the cover in two, because you used too much force. Sigh. Did I mention that there’s no groove, in which to slide your fingernail easily?

(._.)

Performance

I’m really not a tech-spec peddler, so putting in a MediaTek® MT6582 Quad-Core 1.3GHz Processor and 1GB of RAM doesn’t mean anything to me, if all that doesn’t translate to a smooth experience, when I need it to do what I need it to do. In most cases (calling, texting, IM, streaming music), it did fine, but sadly, it did not pass the Subway Surfer test.

Low-budget Android devices typically betray their inadequacy when multitasking. In this case, all I was doing was streaming music and chatting on Twitter, while playing the “endless running game”. Asides from being generally jumpy, on more than one occasion, I crashed into an oncoming train because a Twitter notification came in.

(-_-)

Not very good, for a power gamer like me.

But because I’m a masochist, I tried to put it through Asphalt 8, and surprisingly, it didn’t handle that as badly as I expected (after the Subway Surfer experience). After waiting for aeons for it to load (and growing a beard in the process), it had pretty much the same level of lag, as in the Subway Surfer test. I went and closed everything but Asphalt 8 and Apple Music, so maybe that’s why the experience wasn’t as shitty. Am I being a bit too anal about this? Probably.

Camera

Style came with an 8-Megapixel rear camera (I’m sure we all know by now, that megapixel counts don’t matter), and a 2-Megapixel front camera. Neither of these cameras is going to win any awards, to be honest. I’d say though, that the images seemed a bit underexposed. Decent, under bright sunlight, but sub-par everywhere else. The front camera is nothing to write home about.

mariam and chioma — Say Hi! to @malikah_maryam and @chiomankemdilim from Zikoko.com

Battery

Style has a modest 1900-mAH battery. Wait. that’s actually not modest at all; iPhone 6S sports a 1715-mAH juice pack, and it’s doing okay. But I know that no Android OEM or ODM has the amount of hardware-software integration that lets the iPhone do a full day. The industry average for Android devices is anywhere between 3000 – 4000 mAH. Notwithstanding, AG Mobile haven’t done a bad job with this battery. With very light use – phone calls, Slack (messaging), and Twitter – I was able to do a full day, but I found that when I did any resource-intensive tasks – like playing Asphalt 8 while streaming via Apple Music – it ran out of power much quicker. Don’t be in a hurry to toss your power banks out the window.

With the phone’s “Standby intelligent power saving” feature activated, I was able to squeeze out a few more hours than usual. I reckon this feature turns off the display, and freezes processes, when they aren’t active. Beyond that, Style has a more aggressive “battery saver” mode, which drastically reduces performance across the board, limits vibration, and stops all background communication (stuff like email syncing, updates et al). With battery saver activated, I was able to go up to 2 hours extra on just 6% of battery life remaining, before it finally gave up the ghost. Speaking of ghosts, AG Mobile released another slightly more expensive phone, which promises to never die on you. They called it the AG Mobile Ghost, and it has almost twice the battery capacity of the Style, and comes with a 7500-mAH power bank. A better option, if you’re really finicky about battery life.

Display

The 5” FWVGA IPS display on the AG Mobile Style will win no awards. It isn’t very sharp, and looks oversaturated. My eyes acclimated to it, after a while, though. The touch screen is no more or less sensitive than I would expect from a phone in this price range. I did not enjoy typing on it.

(‘_’)

UI/UX

This device runs Android 5.0 Lollipop, and cannot be upgraded to Marshmallow, or any future iterations, unless the company pushes out a bespoke, AG-specific update (not looking likely, at the moment).

Left: Notification center || Right: Control Panel

It’s pretty run-of-the-mill; there aren’t any UI features that stand out. You swipe down once from the home screen, to reveal the notifications panel, and again, to reveal the control panel. Like in most control panels, there’s a link to the settings menu at the top. You can also increase or reduce brightness, toggle bluetooth, WiFi, airplane mode, lock/unlock device orientation, select between 4 audio profiles, and “cast screen”. From all indications, the last option is used to wirelessly duplicate your display, probably for app demos and stuff like that. This leaves me wondering how the 1.3GHz MediaTek chip will keep up with the load. I like that it didn’t come pre-installed with as much bloatware as I’ve seen on many other Android devices – just social media apps like Facebook, WeChat, BBM, Instagram, and Rdio. I’m guessing that has a lot to do with the 8GB of advertised internal storage not being enough to store all that glut. The actual formatted capacity of this device is 5.1GB, so after downloading a few apps (Apple Music, Twitter, Slack, Subway Surfer, and Asphalt 8), when I tried to get Batman – Arkham Origins, I was prompted to remove some content, before installing.

You can expand the storage with a microSD card, up to 32GB, but I don’t like memory cards, so I didn’t bother buying one. Oh, Google Now worked as expected. Pretty well – just as fast as on any other Android phone.

Audio

Style has a single mono speaker behind it. Not the best UX, for the movie-watching, music-listening crowd, but here we are. It gets loud, but that’s only because it’s boosted in the 2khz – 4khz range (the human ear is most sensitive in this range). Phone calls benefit from this boost, though. Most of the human voice is located in the that range, so this makes listening to vocal recordings, podcasts or talking on the phone, a pretty good experience. But as you can imagine, when listening to music, louder and sharper doesn’t necessarily mean better. There’s virtually no bass representation, so it made the punchy bass drums in Skrillex’ Bangarang EP, sound a bit…wimpy. Cheap, even. Please use headphones, if you want to do more than make calls & hear notification sounds. Possibly because I’m a sound designer by night, I couldn’t help but notice the cheesy sounding sound effects used throughout this device. I kept the phone on “meeting mode” for long periods, because of this. The loud, sharp mono speaker didn’t help in this regard.

(<_<)

Support

To their credit, AG Mobile appears to take local, after-sales support very seriously. Asides from striking partnerships with MTN and Ringo, they have set up a dedicated call center, as well as a service center, in Ikeja, Lagos. All this information is printed on the warranty card that comes in the device packaging. I remember their global marketing exec, Tayshira Santamaria saying that in the coming months, they will roll out more service centers across Nigeria. Also in the pipeline, is an insurance arrangement with Mansard Insurance. This tells me that AG is here for the long haul, and we’ll find out in a few years, if their bet will pay off.

Conclusion: so, should I buy this phone?

Correction: “Who should buy this phone?” When I stopped looking at this phone as my daily driver, but rather, as a backup device, I began to appreciate it a lot more. Throughout my interaction with it, I had to keep reminding myself that it was a low-end Android device, so I shouldn’t expect too much, on any front. I mean, it costs ₦19,200. It’s being marketed at a demographic that communicates via “Wassap”, 2go and BBM, and consumes content on Linda Ikeji, and NAIJ.com – hardly the kinds of people to fuss about UI/UX, graphics rendering and audio fidelity. If you need something more powerful, and you can afford it, you should probably get the AG Mobile Ghost, instead.

(‘-‘ )( ._.)