Hotwav Note 15 Review: specs and features, camera quality test, gaming benchmark, user opinions and photos

HOTWAV Note 15 - too simple to succeed

A few years ago, the smartphone market audience demanded literally two things from phones in the lower price category - to turn on and make calls. However, gradually the demands of buyers increased many times, so today the manufacturer needs to make the device stylish, functional and convenient at a low cost price. Unfortunately, the Chinese company Hotwav, if it coped with the task, then very mediocrely.

The appearance of the new product is not ideal, but nice. There is a dual camera unit, and beautiful colors of the cases, and even a side fingerprint scanner. The only disappointments are the large display frames and the frankly outdated design of the 5-megapixel selfie camera. The 6.56-inch IPS display has a realistic color rendering, but in other respects everything is not very good. The brightness of 450 nits is not enough to see the picture in direct sunlight, because of the HD+ resolution with the selected diagonal, small fonts often look blurry.

Technical characteristics include the UNISOC SC9863A CPU, 4 GB of RAM and a PowerVR GE8322 video accelerator. The bundle is noticeably inferior in performance to the developer's more recent chipsets, the Android 14 interface functions with lags, albeit infrequent. Gaming capabilities are modest, only undemanding 3D games like World Of Tanks Blitz will launch with an acceptable frame rate. Of course, the graphics settings need to be lowered to the minimum presets. There is not much permanent memory, but 64 GB can always be expanded with MicroSD cards. Where there are definitely no problems is the autonomy of the phablet. A 5160 mAh battery with overall energy efficiency of the components allows you to achieve 9-10 hours of active screen time.

Capturing anything with the main 13 and 0.08 megapixel cameras is not that easy, especially when it comes to moving objects. In this situation, blur and noise are guaranteed, so taking pictures is more difficult than capturing documents, it is not recommended. The sound of the single speaker will not cause delight either, it is not loud enough. Contactless NFC payments are missing, which will be a critical minus for frequent visitors to hypermarkets. Thus, we have a cut-down and simplified device, which already has many more interesting alternatives.