iTel has been in the market for quite some time now and you might have seen your colleagues or relatives with feature phones bearing the brand.
They also have smartphones that run Android and one of them is the S11, This phone shows iTel’s ambitions on the rather crowded budget smartphone market (priced under 10,000 KES) and from the specs, they seem to have a good candidate here.
The phone comes with a rather nicely packaged box with red and black accents. Opening the box reveals the phone itself and under it the classic accessories you would expect in a phone (wall adapter, USB cable, earphones, case and the battery).
The iTel S11 is a standard touchscreen phone with a glass front and a removable back cover which is made from both plastic and metal. It comes in three colour options that have become common in recent times which are space Grey, rose Gold and champagne Gold.
It has a 5 inch FWVGA IPS display which has good viewing angles. The processor humming inside is a MediaTek MT6580M which is a quad core CPU design that runs at 1.3Ghz and it is paired with the ARM Mali-400 MP2 GPU. It also has 1GB RAM which is standard at this price point, 8GB of internal storage which can be expanded with a MicroSD card upto 32GB. The battery capacity is 2400mAh which is included in the box.
The primary camera system is a 5MP unit with auto-focus, lens with a fixed f 2.8 aperture and a dual led flash. The secondary “selfie” camera is also a 5MP camera with the same f 2.8 lens (but with a wider field of view which is awesome) and also has been given a front facing flash.
The software that runs on the phone is Marshmallow (Android 6.0) and although that is not the latest Android release, it is commendable iTel was able to bake this on the phone at this price point. The phone is also preloaded with apps like One click cleaner which frees up your RAM and cache (which improves performance), App Freeze which prevents apps from using RAM or CPU resources and Multiple accounts which allows you to manage multiple user accounts of the same app.
The phone can be purchased at any Tricom outlet for Kshs 7,500 which places it at a good position to compete in a segment that has proven to be both popular and extremely competitive.
