Lava Blaze Curve review

When you think of an 18k phone, you would normally expect a feather-light, plastic design with a funky finish. But the Lava Blaze Curve doesn’t feel so, at least on the surface. Apart from the 3D curved AMOLED screen in the front, the Blaze Curve features a premium 3D glass back with a matte finish protected by two layers of reinforced glass. The subtle play of light on the back surface lends it a premium feel while enhancing grip in combination with the slim and curved design. However, it attracts smudges especially if you have sweaty hands like mine. The placement of triple cameras at the rear is an imitation of the iPhones, sans the protruding platform and thick cover glasses. The side band has a glossy metallic finish, which gives the underlying plastic core away only with the slight wobble and smooth curvy edges at the flat top and bottom. The volume rocker and power/sleep button are on the right side, while the dual SIM tray is accommodated at the bottom. The phone is available in Viridian and Iron Glass colours.

The 6.6-inch curved AMOLED display offers FHD+ (2400 x 1080) resolution with 10-bit colour. It’s ready for fast action and smooth scrolling with a 120Hz peak refresh rate and a 240Hz touch sampling rate. The display offers a truly impressive viewing and scrolling experience. You get Normal and Vivid display options with a continuous colour wheel to choose colour temperature. However, the option to choose the default or a standard colour space is accessible only with a scroll-down, which is somewhat unconventional. The display offers brilliant visuals with crisp details, however, we found it skipping a few frames while streaming movies.

The Lava Blaze Curve 5G uses a triple camera system at the rear with a 64MP primary camera, 8MP wide-angle camera and a 2MP macro unit. The cameras are capable of recording 4K videos at 30 fps. The main camera delivers sharp and noise-free images with natural colours outdoors and under bright indoor lighting conditions. Portraits appeared a little over-sharpened, but overall, the camera managed to deliver results better than we expected with shallow depth-of-field. The main camera offers a 64MP high-resolution mode, but the result showed signs of excessive noise reduction and sharpening, especially in low light.

The phone is driven by a 6nm MediaTek Dimensity 7050 5G processor and offers 8GB LPDDR5 physical RAM along with up to an additional 8GB of virtual RAM expansion option. It comes in 128GB and 256GB variants. Though the performance cannot be compared with the current crop of more expensive smartphones, the device offers a credible gaming capability. Games run reasonably smooth with medium graphics settings with frame rate capped at under 65Hz. The phone houses stereo speakers supporting Dolby Atmos audio and we found the sound output quite satisfactory.

The Blaze Curve runs on Android 13, and its most endearing feature should be the clean Android experience. The phone doesn’t come with any bloatware or promotional content, and Lava promises upgrades up to Android 15 and quarterly security updates for three years. Further, the brand offers free service at home for any hardware or software-related issues. A 5000 mAh battery powers the device easily through a day and a half in moderate use and you get a 33W charger bundled with the phone.

Most budget and value smartphone buyers are not primarily looking for a gaming device. Rather, they want a phone that can run regular messaging and entertainment apps like Whatsapp and YouTube without glitches and provides enough storage for their photos and other data. The Lava Blaze Curve does all these with flair with the clean UI providing a seamless experience.