Panasonic Eluga Ray 700 Price in India

Panasonic is a brand which is well known for their consumer electronics, and professional cameras has upped its game by entering the smartphone space. The company is doing a fair job in widening its market share by launching phones in various price segments ranging between Rs. 6,000 to 13,000 in regular intervals. With an aim to offer remarkable battery life on a smartphone, the company recently launched the Eluga Ray 700 which comes with a mammoth 5000mAh battery. While the rest of the specifications to look good, it needs to be seen how well it fares in real life usage. Let’s get started with our review to find out if the Panasonic Eluga Ray 700 is worth your hard-earned money.

The Panasonic Eluga Ray 700 sports a 5.5-inches Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) Full HD IPS Oncell 2.5D curved glass display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. It is powered by the MediaTek MT6753 SoC clocked at 1.3GHz Octa-core processor with Mali T720-MP3 GPU. There is 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage that is expandable up to 128GB. It runs on Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box.

In the camera department, there is a 13MP rear camera with LED Flash, PDAF f/2.0 aperture and a 13MP front camera with LED flash, f/2.2 aperture. Connectivity features include 4G VoLTE, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, and GPS. A 5000mAh battery is on board for all the battery needs.

The Panasonic Eluga Ray 700 despite packing a massive 5000mAh battery and weighing 182 grams, is not heavy in hands. The weight distribution is even; hence you won't stress your hands even after extended usage. The device packs metallic build, but the top and bottom portions of the front and back panel are plastic. The frame running around the four sides is metal and offers excellent grip while holding. Design wise there is nothing that exceptional, it is a regular candy bar-shaped phone. The edges are rounded, and the back panel is slightly curved. Since it is a metal unibody design, the phone is quite slippery, and at 5.5-inches size, one-handed usage is also not very comfortable. Reaching all corners of the screen is an issue when using the device with one hand.

Moving to placements, above the display, you have the primary earpiece, a 13-megapixel front camera, the usual set of sensors like light and proximity, and an LED flash. Down below the screen, there is the Fingerprint sensor, and the three capacitive buttons are placed within the display. On the right side, you find the volume rockers and power button. To the left, there is just the SIM tray. Flipping the device to the rear, there are dual 13MP rear cameras, LED flash, and Panasonic branding. Up top, we just have the 3.5mm audio jack, and on the bottom, you have speaker grill, microphone, and microUSB port. Overall the build quality is quite good and does justice for the price tag.

The Panasonic Eluga Ray 700 sports a 5.5-inches Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) IPS Oncell 2.5D curved glass display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The display produces good colors, and the viewing angles are also great. The company is also bundling a screen protector within the box. With thick bezels on all corners of the display, the screen real estate is less. There is an auto brightness sensor which when enabled adjusts the brightness levels automatically.

It comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection making it one among the very few phones under the Rs. 10,000 segment to have it. It can prevent scratches and cracks to some extent. The brightness levels are good, we had no trouble accessing content outdoors and in direct sunlight as well. The Full HD panel didn’t result in any pixilation of images or text as well. Overall, Panasonic did a good job in terms of screen quality and resolution.

The Panasonic Eluga Ray 700 is powered by the MediaTek MT6753 SoC clocked at 1.3GHz Octa-core processor with Mali T720-MP3 GPU and 3GB RAM. The MT6753 is a tried and tested chipset in phones costing under the Rs. 10,000. The chipset doesn’t disappoint in general day-to-day tasks; it can handle most essential functions like taking calls, social media updates, slight gaming with ease. Apps open up quick, and they load fine. There were no significant frame drops nor stutters in the U.I. However, the performance slightly with drops mixed to heavy usage.

The device struggles to put up a decent show once you push it a little. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp function well, but you can clearly notice lag once you start running resource-intensive tasks all at a time. Multitasking up to 3-4 apps is smooth, but not anything beyond. To eliminate lag and stutters, it's better if you clean the unused apps from the background. The good thing is that there are no heating or freezing issues when with heavy and continuous usage.

Moving to gaming, we did play games like Asphalt 8, Nova 3, Leo’s Fortune, Pokémon Go, etc. All these games were playable, but only if you set the graphics to lowest settings. The fingerprint sensor is present on the front; it is very fast in unlocking the phone. You can register up to five fingers. Overall, the performance of the Eluga Ray 700 is good, but when you compare with the Redmi 4, Lenovo K8 Plus, it is a let down especially on heavy usage.

The Panasonic Eluga Ray 700 features a 13MP rear camera with LED Flash, PDAF f/2.0 aperture and a 13MP front camera with LED flash, f/2.2 aperture. The camera performance in daylight and outdoor conditions is good. The picture quality is decent, and the details are also well maintained. Since it is a budget offering, there are not many features in the camera app. You have an HDR mode, video mode, and beauty mode along with live-filters. There is autofocus support, and the macro shots turn out great. The landscape images clicked in ample lighting conditions have decent color contrast and dynamic range. Turning on the HDR mode brightens the dull photos to a certain extent. Since it has PDAF, focusing is quick and very accurate.

The real problem for the camera starts in low-light conditions. The colors look washed out, and there is too much noise in the images. Turning on the LED flash helps to brighten the image. The front also has the same 13MP shooter with LED flash. It does a great job with the selfies in outdoors and artificial lighting conditions. Since there is LED flash on the front as well, images clicked in semi low-light conditions turn out good. The video quality is fine but is shaky. Overall, the cameras of the Eluga Ray 700 is decent, but the low-light performance is a hit or a miss.

The company is bundling a pair of earphones within the box, and they are in-ear style. The audio quality via the bundled earphones is good, and the default music player is capable of playing a wide range of audio formats. The loudspeaker grill is placed on the bottom, and it doesn’t get muffled when placed on a flat surface. The sound output is loud, and it can easily cover an entire room. With the help of equalizer, you can tweak the sound profiles that best fit your needs.

In the video department, the Eluga Ray 700 was able to play 1080p videos with no heating or freezing issues even with 4G turned on. We installed MX Player for better video playback. Overall, we didn’t really have any problems with the multimedia.

The Panasonic Eluga Ray 700 packs a 5000mAh battery with no support for fast charge. With casual to moderate usage, the device was able to last more than two days on a single charge. On the other hand, with heavy to mixed usage that includes gaming, media consumption, continuous push notifications it could last up to a little over a day. The standby time is really great, and there was no idle battery drain overnight as well. We were very impressed by the battery performance and never checked the amount of juice left at any point in time.

With the bundled charger, it took close to 3 hours of time to charge completely from 1% to 100% which is quite acceptable. The battery is the main USP of the device, and it did a fantastic job. We mean no pun when we say the Panasonic Eluga Ray Ray 700 offers the best battery life on a smartphone in under the Rs. 10,000 price segment beating the Xiaomi’s Redmi 4 series.

The Panasonic Eluga Ray 700 runs on Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box with the interface that is close to stock. Though it is not the latest OS, the interface being stock is an advantage. There is not much in terms of customization, and apart from Google apps, there are a set of pre-installed applications. Few are useful, but the rest is unnecessary, the good thing is that you can uninstall then even if you are not rooted. There is an app drawer where all the downloaded and pre-installed apps reside.

There is 3GB RAM out of which around 1.1GB is usable when just default services and apps are running. The device can handle multitasking smoothly to a certain extent. Since the interface is close to stock, animations and transitions are smooth with no frame drops. Despite the lack of software level customizations, we really had a pleasant experience using the Eluga Ray 700.

The Panasonic Eluga Ray 700 is a worthy contender in the Rs. 10,000 price segment. It shines with a fantastic battery, good build quality, and display. However, on the downside, the performance on heavy usage is not impressive, nor the camera in low-light is good. So, if battery and good display are your priorities, then the Eluga Ray 700 is a no-brainer. But if performance and camera are your requirements, then the Lenovo K8 Plus, Redmi Y1 are better offerings.