Prestigio Grace X5 review

Compromise is usually to be expected on a budget smartphone, particularly when it comes to photography credentials. If you’re lucky, you might get an 8-megapixel sensor, but more often than not you’re landed with a murky 5-megapixel camera that feels more token addition than must-have feature. The £105 Prestigio Grace X5 bucks that trend. It has a massive 13-megapixel rear sensor, which should let you to take high-resolution photos without paying flagship prices.

Unfortunately, the quality of the pictures it takes leaves much to be desired, as even in bright, clear sunshine our pictures looked extremely hazy and large portions of our test shots were lacking in any kind of fine detail. The brickwork on nearby buildings, for instance, was almost completely unrecognisable, as each individual brick had blurred into a single mass of pixels. Window reflections also produced a bright blurry sheen across the picture, making it look as though the colours had blurred across the image.

Turning on HDR mode didn’t help matters either. You’re warned not to move the handset while taking HDR shots, but whereas other budget phones seem to be able to account for a little bit of handshake, the Grace X5 couldn’t cope with it at all. Instead, areas toward the edge of the frame were extremely jerky where the camera had combined the two exposures, and it didn’t help correct the blurry haze we found in Auto mode either.

^ Despite having a 13-megapixel sensor, the photos we took on the Grace X5 were very hazy and lacked a lot of detail

^ Turning on HDR mode helped correct the level of contrast, but lighter objects were still very blurry

This is disappointing, but at least the handset itself is well-made for the price. Measuring 137x68x8mm and weighing 137g, it’s one of the better-looking budget phones we’ve seen recently. We particularly like its rear textured chassis that’s available in either blue or white. This provides a welcome level of grip and the phone’s rounded corners make it very pleasant to hold.

PERFORMANCE AND BENCHMARKS

The Grace X5’s performance is also decent for the price. Its quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MT6582M processor and 1GB of RAM were a little sluggish while web browsing, as media-heavy pages tended to stutter a bit while scrolling, but it was quick enough to run Android 4.4 smoothly.

However, there are other cheap handsets, such as the 2nd Gen Moto E, which are noticeably faster. For example, the Grace X5 scored just 872 overall in our BrowserMark tests, which is a long way behind the Moto E’s 1,169. The Grace X5 also trailed behind in our BaseMark OS II tests, scoring 353 compared to the Moto E’s 488.

Likewise, the Grace X5 struggled with our 3D gaming benchmarks, as its score of 4,909 in BaseMark X 1.1’s Medium quality graphics test averaged to a crawling 7.3fps in the Dunes test and 11.8fps in the Hangar test. You’ll still be able to play simple 2D games like Candy Crush, though, so you won’t be at a complete loss when you’ve got spare minutes to kill.