Panasonic has high hopes for the revived Eluga brand. "Eluga is a perfect mix of sophisticated Japanese technology and Indian ruggedness. This latest product from our stable will provide consumers with elegant and sleek design, perfect and smart user interface, and efficient gateway for network services," said Mr. Toru Hasegawa, Divisional Managing Director, System Solutions Division, Panasonic India at the launch event in New Delhi.
The Panasonic Eluga U feels a bit like the Google Nexus 4 in terms of materials and proportions. However, it is larger, slimmer and less curvy. It also has three capacitive touch buttons rather than the on-screen buttons used by the Nexus and is less curved. As you too can see from the image above, the Eluga U has a bigger 5-inch (720x1280-pixel) IPS OGS display. Pansonic has used Corning Gorilla Glass 3 on the front of the device, while the back sports what the company describes as "anti-shatter crystal glass", though it appeared more like plastic to us. The build quality of the unibody Eluga U appeared to be decent for the price.
The Eluga U smartphone runs on Android 4.4.2 KitKat out-of-the-box with company's Fit Home UI on top. Users can switch to the stock KitKat launcher from the phone Settings if they wish to. The Eluga U smartphone packs a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor coupled with 2GB of RAM. Considering the combination, we were not expecting it to perform exceptionally well and it was on par with our expectations. The Eluga U comes with 16GB of inbuilt storage space, which can be expanded by up to 32GB using a microSD card.
SPECIFICATIONS
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The Eluga U smartphone feels too underpowered to be a flagship device.Connectivity options include 3G, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Hotspot, Bluetooth 4.0, and GPS/A-GPS. The Eluga U sports a 13-megapixel autofocus primary camera along with an LED flash, and a 2-megapixel secondary front-facing camera. We took few images outdoors using the rear camera, and they looked good enough on the device's HD IPS screen. The detailing was fine, but colours appeared oversaturated. Overall, our first impressions of the camera are that it is quite average.
