Smart, sleek and with a French flavour

A SLEEK NEW phone with an amazingly thin 5.1mm profile, the Wiko Highway Pure 4G is a 4G smartphone from France that’s new to the Thai market.

Costing just Bt7,990, the Highway Pure is powered by a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 Quad-Core processor and has plenty of working memory or 2 gigabytes of RAM as well as 16 GB of internal storage. While there’s no microSD card slot for expanding the storage, you can use a flash drive that supports OTG (On-The-Go) technology to temporarily expand the storage.

The smartphone boasts a beautiful 4.8-inch HD (1280 x 720 pixel) amoled display, which is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3 on the front and back. The thin body is deceptively strong thanks to the aluminium casing and the protective glass.

The Highway Pure runs on Android 4.4.4 (KitKat) operating system and it supports 4G LTE 800/1800/2100 MHz and HSPA+ 3G 850/900/2100 MHz. The phone uses a nano SIM card.

I tested Highway Pure on True Move H’s 4G network and found it uploaded and downloaded very fast. Benchmarked with Ookla speed test app, I managed to achieve a download speed of 57.51 Mbps and upload speed of 21.58 Mbps. I could post snapshots to my Facebook wall in no time at all. Downloading and installing apps was also done in a breeze. Checking mails and sending mails was satisfactorily fast.

The phone has good performance as well. Its touch screen and menus were very responsive and scrolling was fast and smooth.

The smartphone comes with good quality cameras – 8-megapixel main camera and 5-megapixel front camera. The main camera uses a Sony image sensor so captures good quality shots and the front camera with its BSI (back-side illuminated) sensor is great for selfies. 

The smartphone captured good quality photos in most lighting environments. Both cameras also have Face beauty mode for enhancing portrait shots. You can also select Mono, Negative, Sepia, Aquatic, Solarize, Posterize, Neon and Sketch colour effects.

The main camera comes with plenty of controls and shooting modes. In additions to auto, there’s Action, Night, Sunset, Landscape, Night Portrait, Candlelight, Backlight and Flowers. The Highway Pure can play High-Resolution music files of FLAC 24-bit/96 kHz, a mere notch lower than the full Hi-Res format of FLAC 24-bit/ 192 kHz. 

I tested the Hi-Res song playback with Sony MDR-1ABT Hi-Res headphones using an audio cable and Johnny Moon’s “Heart”, which I downloaded from www.Bandit.fm thanks to Sony’s Hi-Res song promotion, sounded great. The song played smoothly with a lot of music details and powerful bass.

Although Wiko is new to the Thai market, the brand ranks |second in sales in France, |according to Wiko Mobile Thailand. For Thai users, its arrival means more choices of affordable smartphones and that can only be a good thing.

 

Key Specs

- Network: 4G: LTE 800/1800/2100 MHz; 3G: HSPA+ WCDMA 850/900/2100 MHz; GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900

- Operating System: Android4.4.4 (KitKat)

- Processor: Snapdragon 410 MSM8916 Quad Core 1.2 GHz, Cortex-A53

- Storage:16 GB

- Memory: 2 GB RAM

- Display: 4.8-inch AMOLED touch-screen display with 1280 x 720 pixels

- Cameras: 8 MP main camera, 5 MP front camera

- Connectivity: Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, USB 2.0 |supports OTG

- SIM card: 1 Nano SIM

- Available Colours: White/Gold; Black/Grey; Black/Gold; Black/Bleen

- Size: 141.9x68.1x5.1 mm

- Weight: 98g (with battery)

n Battery: 2000 mAh Li-Po