Kazam Tornado 348 review – The world’s thinnest phone.

At the time of writing, the Kazam Tornado 348 is officially the world’s thinnest smartphone. Certified by the Guinness Book of Records, this tiny 4.8in smartphone is an astounding 5.15mm thick, making it noticeably slimmer than even Huawei’s 6.18mm Ascend P6. An aluminium magnesium alloy chassis means the Tornado 348 weighs just 95.5g, making it even lighter than the featherweight iPhone 5s.

It’s an incredible piece of engineering, and the metal frame makes it feel much sturdier than either its svelte profile or weight should allow. However, while we wouldn’t have any qualms about carrying it around in our pockets, our review sample quickly picked up quite a number of scratches on both the front and back of the handset. This will inevitably happen to any smartphone after a while, but we’re disappointed it happened so quickly on the Tornado 348. Admittedly, it does come with a protective silicone case in the box, but this rather defeats the point of it being so thin in the first place. Still, the minimal, iPhone 5s-inspired design is certainly attractive, and we’re sure it will appeal to anyone conscious about the size and weight of their smartphone.

^ Very, very, very thin

That said, having such a svelte handset isn’t always a good thing, as the Tornado 348 not only gets very warm very quickly when browsing the web and playing games, but it also means there’s not much room for a decent sized battery. In our continuous video playback test, for instance, the 2,050mAh battery lasted just 8 hours and 26 minutes when we set the brightness to 170cd/m2, which less than we’d expect for a phone of this price. This should still just about get you through the day, but the similarly-priced Huawei Honor 6 lasted another two hours in the same test, making it that bit more reliable if you’ve got a long day ahead of you.

Likewise, despite its fast and powerful-sounding name, the Tornado 348’s performance is more gust of wind than devastating force of nature. We were hoping its octa-core 1.7GHz Mediatek MT6592 processor might be able to match the octa-core processor of the Huawei Honor 6, but the Tornado 348 only managed a score of 1,136ms in our SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks compared to the Honor 6’s score of 617ms. This was with the CPU power saving mode turned off as well, which is meant to limit the CPU’s power in order to prolong the phone’s battery life and lower the phone’s internal temperature.  With it turned on, the Tornado 348 took even longer to complete the test, scoring 1,221ms.

This isn’t particularly quick for a £250 handset, and there was a noticeable delay in our real-world testing when we began scrolling through complex, image-heavy websites. This meant web browsing could quite jerky and unresponsive at times, although it was still able to handle its largely vanilla Android 4.4.2 operating system perfectly fine.

The Tornado 348 also struggled with several of our graphics tests. We were only able to select High rather than Ultra High quality in our Epic Citadel test, which it finished in a very respectable 61.1fps at its native resolution of 1,280×720, but our more demanding 3DMark Ice Storm test reduced it to an average of just 22.5fps with its score of 5,426. This pales in comparison to the Honor 6, which maxed out this test and performed almost twice as fast in our additional Ice Storm Extreme and Ice Storm Unlimited tests.

The Tornado 348 certainly has the better screen, however. The 4.8in AMOLED display produced much more accurate colours than the Honor 6, covering a full 100 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. Perfect 0.00cd/m2 black levels gave the display a much higher level of contrast.

It’s also surprisingly bright for an AMOLED panel, as we measured a peak brightness of 320.73cd/m2 when we enabled the phone’s High Brightness mode. This will obviously drain the phone’s already mediocre battery life much faster, but it certainly adds a little extra punch to its already rich and vibrant colours. Without the high brightness mode, the phone’s white levels dropped to 242.12cd/m2, but this is around what we’d normally expect to see from an AMOLED display.

We’re not big fans of the Tornado 348’s rear 8-mgeapixel camera, as all of our outdoor photos had a distinct blue tinge to them, even on a bright sunny day. This really spoiled our shots, and the sensor also struggled to replicate areas with more intricate details. The brickwork in one of our test shots, for instance, was very blurry in places, and bright patches of sky and other white, reflective surfaces were severely overexposed.

Our images improved when we enabled the phone’s HDR mode, as lighter areas of detail became much more pronounced and highlighted against its darker surface area, and clouds and the sky returned to normal, more natural-looking hues. All of our images still looked very blue and cool, though, so colours didn’t look any richer or more accurate.

^ The HDR mode has a distinctly cool, blue sheen

Indoors, the blue sheen seemed to disappear, but there was a lot of noise in our still life test. Shadows were speckled with rainbow effects and the different textures of our toys were completely lost in the low lighting conditions. Even objects that were relatively well lit looked soft and blurry round the edges, although enabling HDR did help to pick out some of the lighter details and textures. However, HDR also made all the noise appear much more pronounced and grainy, giving our photos an artificial and brittle look, so we’d recommend keeping it turned off indoors.

The Kazam Tornado 348 may be a world-record holder, but its sub-par performance, mediocre battery life and poor camera certainly hasn’t blown us away. We like the design and svelte chassis, but there’s little else to recommend it when the Huawei Honor 6 gives you so much more for the same price. Alternatively, if you don’t fancy Huawei’s Emotion interface and you’d rather have a pure Android experience, then you can still pick up a Nexus 5 for around £270.