Prestigio Multiphone 5550 Duo review

For the past two years, the budget smartphone market has been dominated by a single handset: Motorola’s Moto G. With fast internals, a great screen and excellent battery life, it set the bar so high for phones under £150 that most can’t hold a candle to its amazing value. The Prestigio Multiphone 5550 Duo is the first handset we’ve seen in some time that comes close to narrowing that gap.

Prestigio is new to the UK, but is actually one of the biggest tablet and mobile phone manufacturers in Eastern Europe. On paper, the 5550 Duo sounds almost too good to be true: it’s not only larger than the Moto G, with a 5.5in 1,280×720 display, but also around £20 cheaper SIM-free, making it the cheapest phablet we’ve ever tested by some margin. Add in a 13-megapixel camera and 8GB of internal storage, and it gives similarly sized phones like the HTC Desire 816 a real run for their money.

We like the design, too, as the rounded edges make it comfortable to hold and the smooth plastic back provides enough purchase without it slipping out of your hand. It’s not the slimmest of phones, but at 9.2mm thick and weighing 181g, it feels sturdy and well built.

The 5.5in screen doesn’t produce particularly accurate colours, as our colour calibrator only measured an sRGB colour gamut score of 80.5%. This is quite low, even for a budget phone, and colours looked weak and washed out as a result. Photos and videos don’t look quite as rich and vibrant as they do on other handsets.

High brightness levels, which we measured at a peak 496.91cd/m2, don’t help this. Although it’s brighter than most flagship phones, which is great if you’re using it outside, it almost certainly spells doom for the 5550 Duo’s battery life. Our battery tests were surprisingly low considering it uses a massive 3,000mAh battery.

In our continuous video playback test, for example, the phone lasted just 9h 19m with the screen set to 170cd/m2, which doesn’t even reach half its overall brightness. While still a decent score compared to the Moto G, which lasted another 20 minutes in our tests, other cheap phablets such as the HTC Desire 816 managed 13h 47m with a smaller battery.

Black levels were also high at 0.61cd/m2, which made it harder to read small text on websites like BBC News than the Moto G. There wasn’t much in it, though, as the 5550 Duo’s cleaner, purer whites helped text to stand out against the background.

PERFORMANCE AND BENCHMARKS

Performance-wise, the quad-core 1.3.GHz MediaTek MT6582 processor couldn’t quite match the Moto G, despite an almost identical score of 1,423ms in our JavaScipt SunSpider tests. Android 4.4 in particular was noticeably slower on the 5550 Duo, as animations weren’t quite as slick and menu screens took longer to load.

It’s not enough of a delay to make using the phone frustrating, but the 5550 Duo also scored lower in our PCMark benchmarks as well, which test web browsing, video playback, writing documents and photo editing performance. With an overall score of 1980, it was almost a full 1,000 points behind the Moto G’s score of 2850. It underperformed by a similar margin in all four sections of the test, so the 5550 Duo won’t feel as fast during everyday use. For reference, a flagship phone such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 scores around 4,000 overall.

It’s also worth noting that Prestigio currently has no plans to update the 5550 Duo to Android 5.0 Lollipop, unlike Motorola, which will definitely be upgrading the Moto G via an OTA update sometime this year. While Android 4.4 is a perfectly decent operating system, it’s a shame that you’ll be stuck using this version of Android for the lifetime of the handset.

The 5550 Duo also couldn’t compete with the Moto G on graphics performance. Whereas the Moto G scored 5,612 (or 23.1fps) in our 3DMark Ice Storm test, the Multiphone 5550 Duo only scored 3,118, or an average of 16.1fps. Only the High quality option was available in our Epic Citadel test, whereas the Moto G was able to run on Ultra. The 5550 Duo still managed a perfectly acceptable score of 47fps, but when we tried running games such as Assassin’s Creed Pirates, textures were smoothed over and very muddy, with precious little background detail. Again, it’s not a major flaw, as games still run perfectly well, but the Moto G is still the clear winner.

CAMERA

Our biggest complaint was the 5550 Duo’s 13-megapixel camera. While colours generally looked very good, closer inspection revealed that there was hardly any detail present at all, with buildings and textures appearing very fuzzy and undefined.

^ Despite its 13-megapixel rating, we found images to be lacking fine detail , click to enlarge

We also found it difficult to take good pictures using the camera’s HDR mode, as it requires you to hold the phone dead still while it takes shots at different exposures. We did our best to minimise handshake, but several shots still came out noticeably blurry. Then again, HDR rarely improved the quality of our photos, as they were equally hazy as the non-HDR shots we captured.

CONCLUSION

As a result, the Moto G is still our favourite inexpensive Android phone, even though we mostly like what we’ve seen from Prestigio. If you’re set on something a little larger then the 5550 Duo has plenty of potential – assuming you don’t want to pay an extra £100 for an HTC Desire 816. If the camera and battery life were a little better, it could have been a potential award winner, but as it stands the Multiphone 5550 Duo falls short of claiming the Moto G’s crown. If none of these take your fancy then check out our regularly-updated Best Smartphones.