Coolpad Cool Play 6 – Its 6GB RAM and Battery is Its Forte – Review

Chinese brand, Coolpad has been introducing quite decent smartphones in India in affordable segment. Infact, Coolpad is the first brand to offer fingerprint scanner on its smartphone under Rs. 10,000 category which has become a trend now. To take its success story forward, Coolpad introduced Cool series with the introduction of Cool 1 smartphone which was packed with Dual Camera set-up in the back at Rs. 11K. Now the company has taken one step further and launched Coolpad Cool 6 phone which besides having Dual cameras, also boasts of 6GB RAM. Equipping the phones with massive RAM has also become a norm with Chinese companies like OnePlus and Huawei.

Design

On the design front, the Cool Play will remind you of Cool 1 and LeEco Le Max 2. This phone has metal unibody design. Very good quality metal has been used to give it a premium look. The edges on the back are curved and Dual rear camera in vertical has little bump, which is not an issue at all. Fingerprint sensor has been given behind the cameras. Coolpad branding is at the bottom of the rear panel. On the front, there are three navigation keys which are illuminated. The side bezels of the display are narrow whereas the bezels above the screen and at bottom are not. Still the front display looks fine and USB Type-C and stereo speakers are placed at the bottom. On the top, their is 3.5mm audio jack, volume rocker and power button on the right side and Dual SIM card tray is at the top of the right side. Despite its screen size of 5.5 inch, this phone provides good grip, the back panel is not slippery and you can easily operate with single hand. Overall, the appearance of this phone is quite impressive.

Coolpad smartphones are known for its very fast responsive fingerprint sensors and Cool Play 6 takes this legacy forward with aplomb. Setting up the fingerprint scanner is very cool and you can set-up your five fingers on it. It will unlock the phone in split second and that is one of the beauty of this feature.

Display

This phone comes with 5.5-inch full HD display with resolution of 1080×1920 pixels resolution. It has decent viewing angles and offers vibrant colours which  look a bit oversaturated sometimes. It offers good visibility even under the sun of both text and images. The display comes with various modes such as Normal, Vivid, Natural and Eye Care and you have the option to set the display from warm to cold hues.

Performance

This phone is packed with huge 6GB RAM and is armed with octa-core Snapdragon 653 processor (four 1.95GHz cores and four 1.4GHz cores) and Adreno 510 GPU . During our use of this phone, we obserrved that courtesy the huge RAM, the device runs without any lags or crashes, switching between the apps is smooth.  This phone is touted as gaming smartphone and this claim of Coolpad proves rightly as its massive RAM gives you enough space to play even heavy graphic  games and Snapdgragon 653 processor ably assist for uninterrupted gaming experience.Even when you play heavy games on this phone, you will have pleasant experience without any hicups except that the phone does get heated a little bit after prolonged use but it is negligible issue. This phone comes with 64GB of internal storage which surprisingly is not extendable and you will have to remain content with the provided storage.

This phone is packed with 4000mAh battery and its performance is really of 4500mAh battery as claimed by Coolpad during presentation. I can vouch for this as during my intensive usuage of this phone for emails, social medias, gaming and YouTube viewing, it has almost worked for one a half day, which is an excellent performance. The call quality of this phone is quite good and its speaker renders good audio output.

Cameras

One of the prominent features of this phone is its Dual cameras on the back – the first camera is of 13MP for monochrome with 6P lens, autofocus, Dual-tone LED flash, f/2.0 aperture and the secondary camera is also of 13MP for depth of field and Bokeh effect which Coolpad has renamed it as SLR effect. In our usage of the phone, we have observed that SLR effect is not consistent even when you click images in daylight and probably some software tweaks are required.

The camera comes with various modes such as panorama, gif, pro, mono photo, mono video, beauty and night. It also has Beauty mode with features of whiten, smooth, slim, enlarge and implementation of them is decent. Its camera is also capable of shooting 4K videos. The images captued on this camera in daylight come with reasonably good detail and color reproduction is almost true to actuals. Reproduced are few images clicked with this in daylight:

Like other cameras in this range, this phone also struggles when the images are captured in low light as you can see below the details are lacking in the image captured in night and in very low light:

For selfies, this phone has been mounted with an 8MP camera on the front with f/2.2 aperture. The results of the selfie camera are quite decent for social sharing.

This phone runs on new Journey OS based on Android Nougat 7.1.1 and Coolpad has claimed that will be updated to Android 8.0 Oreo by the end of this year. We have never been comfortable with layers of Chinese smartphones as they result in some bloatwares and this OS is no exception. While the UI runs most of the time without hiccups yet some lags are there which probably would be sorted out soon with software updates. It comes with preloaded apps such as Facebook, UC News, NewsDog, UC Browser, Prime Video and Xender etc which cannot be deleted. On the positive side, the feature of Dual Apps is very well placed in this phone. You can easily set-up two accounts for your social media such as Whatsapp, Facebook etc for using this phone for your personal and official use.

To sum up, Cool Play 6 has cool features of big RAM, powerful battery life, fingerprint scanner is very quick to react. As far as camera is concerned, you get good results which may not be par excelllence but good for social media sharing. Priced at Rs. 14,999 this phone will go on sale in India on 4th September. You can definitely consider this phone if you are looking at huge RAM, plays a lot of games and hate carrying power banks with you. Despite the fact that other phones are also available in this range yet the 6GB RAM would still be one of the plus point of this phone which will compell you to have a serious look at this phone.