Spice's stellar pinnacle

In a market where smartphones are becoming increasingly homogeneous—regardless of company, most of them look the same, run the same or very similar operating systems and offer the same functionality—the ones that can differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack have a huge advantage. Spice Mobile enters such a market with its Stellar Pinnacle, and successfully integrates features that set it apart from most of the competition.

The phone itself looks like a standard smartphone—sleek design, large screen, no physical buttons except the ones on the side and top for volume, camera and power on/off. With dimensions of 152 x 79 x 10.3 mm, it's a little on the large side, but there is a large market that prefers that—the entire phablet market is testament to the demand for larger-than-smartphone devices. So that's not a problem, even though personally I prefer a device that fits and can be used comfortably with one hand. But the thing is, a large device comes with the added advantage of a large screen—at 5.3 inches with 540 x 960 pixels, the Pinnacle's screen is the perfect size for some personal movie watching, and offers great clarity at the same time. The touchscreen sensitivity is fantastic, putting to rest apprehensions that smartphones from smaller companies do not compare to the Samsungs and Apples of the world in terms of quality. That may have been true a few years ago, but the competition has caught up impressively.

The cameras (yes, it has a front camera as well) are impressive, with the 8 megapixel back camera doing a pretty good job in even low-light conditions, and the 5 megapixel back camera making Skype calls a dream. The sound hardware leaves a little to be desired, with the volume not going high enough to combat traffic noise. But, that said, the headphone included are pretty good and offset some of the inadequacies of the phone's sound hardware.

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