Last year Lava introduced the Blaze – a sub-₹ 10,000 phone that didn’t feel cheap, largely thanks to its glass back. Now the company is ready to launch the sequel with the help of Amazon India. The new model still has a glass black (in Blue, Black and Orange) and is a fairly big upgrade over the original. The price will be ₹ 9,000 during a special launch offer – sales start on April 18th. The regular price of the phone is ₹ 11,000.
The Lava Blaze 2 brings a much more powerful
chipset, a Unisoc T616. It has two Cortex-A75 cores in addition to six A55s and
a Mali-G57 MP1. For comparison, the Helio A22 of the original Blaze had only
four CPU cores and they were old A53 cores at that. Lava is promising an AnTuTu
9.5.5 score of over 250K, the company says that this makes it the most powerful
phone in its segment (sub-₹ 10,000 phones).
Additionally, the RAM is doubled to 6GB
(plus 5GB of virtual RAM, if you want it), so the performance of the new model
will be way up from the original. The storage capacity is doubled too and is
now 128GB (UFS 2.2). It can be expanded with a microSD card (up to 1TB).
However, the phone still runs Android 12 out of the box, which is getting quite
old at this point.
The display is getting a boost too, it’s
still a 6.5” IPS LCD with HD+ resolution (20:9), but it now has a 90Hz refresh
rate. The fingerprint reader moved to the side (the power button) and needs
0.383s to unlock the phone (that is faster than the 0.76s needed by the face
unlock system to do the same).
Another improvement is to the 5,000mAh
battery, which now boasts a charge rating of 18W (up from 10W). Charging still
isn’t super fast as takes 2 hours 9 minutes to get to 100%. Once full, the
battery is good for 8 hours of YouTube playback. There is a USB-C port on the
bottom, next to a 3.5mm headphone jack. FM radio is on board. Something that
hasn’t changed is the camera setup – there is a 13MP main module on the back
with a 2MP helper and LED flash, plus an 8MP camera on the front (a punch hole
this time).
Even so, the Lava Blaze 2 is a major
improvement over the original with the new chipset being the biggest upgrade.
Again, the launch price is ₹ 9,000 and you will find the phone on Amazon and on
Lava’s own online store starting on April 18. Lava’s Free service @ home offer
means that if anything goes wrong with the phone, a technician will come to
your doorstep to resolve the issue (subject to terms & conditions, of
course).
