Wickedleak Wammy Titan 4 review: Mammoth battery for longer chats

In an age of power-packed smartphones, the user is left to compromise on one main factor—the battery life. In the midst of a tough competition where rival smartphones are at war with the fastest and most powerful smartphone yet, the core requirement of the main consumer, the battery life, seems to be ignored completely. Here is where Wickedleak takes the upper hand to launch one of the first smartphones in India with a mammoth battery of a whopping 5350mAh. The manufacturer also boasts of the first smartphone with a fingerprint scanner and a big battery to be retailed at an affordable price of Rs 14,990. Let’s check out what the Titan 4 has to offer to its consumers. Wickedleak has been teasing about the Titan 4 having the world’s largest battery yet, but now there are rival smartphone manufacturers moving closer.  

Wickedleak, an Indian smartphone company that was founded way back in 2009, has been manufacturing budget smartphones in India, under the Wammy umbrella. This time, the company has gone to an extent to bring in an affordable smartphone with features that not one has offered in this price bracket.  The Titan 4 sports a simple elegant look with a two-tone design. The front face is an all glass display panel with a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 surface. The front panel sports a physical oval Home button with a fingerprint sensor housed within it and two backlit Back and Menu buttons on either sides. Towards the top lay the sensors, the front camera and the earpiece.

The Titan 4 has a chrome rim running around the sides, with the power and volume buttons on the right and the micro USB port and headphone jack on the top. The bottom sports a stereo speaker grille and the microphone cleverly hidden within. The rear panel is removable and features the primary camera towards the top-left corner with a single LED flash besides it. Below the rear panel are the housings for the two SIM cards and the micro SD card. The battery is a non-removable type and can be only be replaced by the service center in case of issues, if any. The rear panel also sports the NFC antenna, which is connected via two leads on the chassis. The device is 9.3mm thick and weighs in at a heavy 199g—because of the large battery housed within the chassis.

The Wammy Titan 4 has a large 5-incher full HD OGS display sporting a 1080x1920 pixel IPS panel. Below the hood is a powerful MediaTek MT6592 chipset with an octa-core processor buzzing at 1.7GHz. Clubbed along for a powerful user experience is a quad core Mali-450 graphics processor along with 2GB of RAM. The internal storage is capped at 16GB, but is expandable up to 64GB using the micro SD card slot. The primary camera sports a 16MP sensor, the largest in its price category, while the front camera is an 8MP.

The Titan 4 also sports some unique features, which place it apart from the competition in the same price bracket. The smartphone sports a biometric fingerprint sensor, which is one of the most secure password protections available on a smartphone. Apart from this, the Titan also sports a 5330mAh battery, which the manufacturer claims to run for around three to four days without the need to look for a charging point. Lastly, the Wammy Titan 4 sports standard connectivity options such as Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, NFC and Bluetooth v4.0.

   

The Titan is a tad heavier than conventional smartphones with a 5-inch display, or a similar size and form-factor. The main reason is the large powerhouse, the 5350mAh battery fuelling the device from within. Due to the mammoth battery, the Titan 4 also bears a slightly thicker shell at 9.3mm. Though the device is a bit bulky, it still shares a comfortable grip—thanks to the matte-finished rear panel.

As far as usability is concerned, the Titan 4 can be a tad uncomfortable for those with tiny hands. We did find the Home button to be a bit harder than we usually would want it to be. The tactility is a bit of a concern and Wickedleak should take note of the hard button, as this will hamper the performance of the smartphone. One has to press harder to execute the Home button. Finally, the handset presently runs on Android KitKat, but the company guarantees an OTA update of Lollipop within a few weeks.

The user interface is built on stock Android. This means that there are no bloatware apps installed, leaving around 13GB free space for users to install their apps and data. You will find necessary apps such as a flashlight, a file browser and an app and data backup application as the only additionally installed apps. The user interface is plain and simple and users can take advantage of this to get decent performance during daily use.

As far as the performance is concerned, we did not notice any lags and glitches. The Titan 4 performs as promised and the octa-core processor is powerful enough for most of your daily smartphone chores, along with casual to medium gaming and alike. However, the performance could be affected by the types and amount of apps you would install on the smartphone. We also did find the issue of heating when charging the smartphone—the upper half of the Titan 4 tends to heat up when connected to the charger. The reason could be the 2A charger provided for the smartphone which is meant to charge the huge battery at a faster rate.

The display on the Titan 4 is crisp, clear and vibrant, but it could have been better with a little higher brightness level. While indoors, the display looks great, but when in broad sunlight, you may have a little issue with visibility. The viewing angle is also good and we found no problems of colour inversions and fading from any angle—thanks to the OGS technology and the IPS panel on the titan 4. The audio quality is also decent and average. Surprisingly, the chassis design boasts of a stereo speaker grille on the bottom, but we found that the speaker is a mono driver and only placed on one side of the device. We are not able to confirm this if it was a manufacturing defect with the handset we received or if the extra grille is for grooming purposes only.

The primary camera on the Titan 4 is a 16MP camera and is certainly one of the first smartphones to sport a large sensor in this price range. The camera sports standard features such as HDR, beauty mode, panorama and multi-angle modes. Apart from the regular, it also sports motion tracking and live photo modes, which we assume would be rarely used by most owners.

Photos captured by the primary camera are a tad above average. The pictures are sharp, but lack brightness. Dark areas are low-lit while bright areas seem overexposed. We also found the photos to have a little warm tinge, which can be corrected by any image processing software on your PC. The HDR mode was a little disappointing—photos are not captured fast enough (slow shutter speed) and hence if you have a moving subject in your frame, they seem like ghosts or may have a double edge. Click on the photos (above and below) to see the full resolution to judge the camera quality yourself.

As far as the battery life of the Titan 4 is boasted, it seems pretty much true since the handset is powered by a 5350mAh battery, almost double as compared to most smartphones out there. With a huge battery size, the Titan 4 is destined to give you at least 2.5 – 3 days of juice with casual / average use. If you are using 3G, browsing the internet and playing games pretty often, then you should get at least 1.5 – 2 days. If you are a minimal user, you can expect more than 3 days of power. Juicing up the battery from complete zero to 100 per cent can be done with the bundled charger within 3 – 4 hours. Lastly, Wickedleak also claims that you can donate your battery life to another device or smartphone by charging it using a USB OTG cable. The Titan 4 can help charge another device with confidence. However, charging another device will be done slowly since the donor will not be able to give out the necessary current (power) rating required by the receiver. In short, you can use the Titan 4 as an emergency power bank for other devices.

The experience with the Titan 4 was overwhelming, but we did have a few complaints. Firstly, the device is a tad heavier as compared to other smartphones we used till date. Secondly, the Home button and the power / volume have a little tactility issue, and the camera performance is just slightly above average. All in all, if you are looking for a powerful enough smartphone and are concerned about a short battery life, and wouldn’t mind a little extra weight, the Titan 4 is a good choice.