Lyf F8 is Here: Amidst Growing Worries Lyf Launches a Value for Money Smartphone

Reliance’s Lyf brand has seen more highs and lows in its first year of existence than some brands do in their entire lifetimes. After a much awaited launch that saw Lyf mobiles storm to become the fifth largest smartphone brand in India by shipments the parent company took the market by storm with the revolutionary Jio Preview offer.

As unprecedented highs were being met Reliance’s decision to open the Jio Preview offer to other smartphone brands sort of backfired and Lyf began to experience a decline in sales. Now the company is determined to get back to winning ways and is launching new phones by the dozen.

Their latest offering is the Lyf F8. Let’s take a closer look at the specifications on this phone.

Specifications – Lyf F8

The Lyf F8 comes with a 4.5 inch IPS display that has a screen resolution of 480 x 854 pixels. This is a AGC glass display. AGC is a European company that produces and distributes glass for industries such as construction, automotive, and solar. Needless to say Lyf has taken a different approach to providing protective glass displays on its product. The industry favorite Corning Gorilla Glass has been overlooked.

The Lyf F8 has a 1.3 GHz Quad Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor with an Adreno 304 GPU and a 1 GB RAM. These are pretty good specifications for a smartphone that is expected to be priced less than Rs. 4,500.

More from iSpyPrice: Check out the expected India price of Lyf F8 mobile

While the internal storage on the phone is a pretty standard 8 GB, the good news is that it can be expanded up to 128 GB using a microSD card slot. This is still not a common feature for phones in this price segment.

The primary camera on the phone is an 8 megapixel unit which supports LED flash. The secondary camera is 5 megapixels. Both cameras support 6X digital zoom. Some other interesting camera features are Auto Frame Rate, Red Eye Reduction, Continuous Auto Focus, Video HDR supported in code, Smile Detection, Gaze detection, and Blink Detection.

It seems almost futile to point out that the Lyf F8 is a dual SIM 4G phone (GSM + LTE) because all Lyf phones are 4G phones. Affordable 4G connectivity is at the core of the Lyf brand and the Jio offer. The F8 also supports VoLTE. The dimensions of the F8 are 132.6 x 66.2 x 9.3 mm and it weighs a mere 138 grams. That is a good weight for its form factor.

The F8 comes with a battery capacity of 2000 mAh. This battery will reportedly provide up to 8 hours of 4G talktime and up to 160 hours of standby time. There are quite a few interesting motion and gesture features to look forward to on the Lyf F8. These include Flip to Mute and Double Tap to Wake.

The Lyf F8 is powered by Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS. It is interesting that Android 7.0 Nougat has not seen swift adoption rates in the low-budget price segment. Comparatively Android Marshmallow had picked up adoption pretty fast. The low-budget price segment is increasingly one of the largest segments in the smartphone industry. This could lead to a case of further Android fragmentation issues which is something Google has been trying to avoid for quite sometime.

Lyf mobile needs a quick turnaround

After all that the Lyf brand has gone through this year it needs to get its act together and do it quickly. Apart from declining sales Lyf has also in the midst of a controversy right now. Reports indicate that a Lyf phone burst into flames and almost injured the family that owned it.

If the explosive timeline of Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is any indication that things could spiral out of control pretty fast when such unwanted events take place, Lyf has its work cut out. A quick turnaround in sales and shipments is the need of the hour and positive marketing may just be the short term answer to Lyf’s current woes.