Lava Agni 3 review: An overachiever
The Lava Agni 3 is not an average mid-range smartphone, it features much more than any other device in this price range. On paper, the phone is excellent, but does that also translate to its real-world performance? Yes. Read the detailed review of the phone by India Today Tech.
Lava Agni 3
Lava Agni 3 review
Pros
- iPhone-like Action key
- Interactive secondary display
- Smooth display
- Great battery
Cons
- Front camera
- Little heavy
In Short
- Lava Agni 3 features a 6.78-inch display that has vivid colours
- It features an iPhone-like Action key, which is customisable
- The phone has a 5,000mAh battery that easily lasts through the day
Lava has recently unveiled its mid-range smartphone, Lava Agni 3, in India, and it's feature-packed. At a starting price of Rs 20,999, the device offers features you wouldn't usually expect on a smartphone in this price range: it has an iPhone-like Action Key, a secondary display, a 5,000mAh battery, and a 50-megapixel primary camera. The smartphone is powered by a MediaTek Dimesity 7300X chipset. Sounds like a solid smartphone. However, in this review, India Today Tech attempts to find out if the phone also offers just as solid an experience in real life.
Premium design
The Lava Agni 3 has a design language slightly similar to that of the Blaze X. The back panel is beautifully curved on the edges, and has a smooth finish that feels good to touch. It has a metallic frame, which feels premium. I have the blue variant, and while it looks stunning, I noticed that it attracts smudges easily. That, however, can be fixed by using a case that comes bundled in the device's retail box.
The Lava Agni 3 has a slim build and is only 8.8mm thick. It is slightly heavy, but the weight distribution of the device is so good that it wouldn't actually bother the user. Notably, if a thin smartphone is something you are particularly looking out for, in this price segment the OnePlus Nord CE4 and Motorola Edge 50 Neo are lighter and slimmer, with 8.4mm and 8.1mm thickness respectively.
The back panel of the Lava Agni 3 features a rectangular island, which houses a triple-camera set-up and a secondary display, called Insta screen. The company is the first one to bring a secondary display to a sub-Rs 25,000 smartphone. The Insta screen is a 1.74-inch AMOLED display, and it lets you check notifications, manage calls, shuffle songs and view charging updates, without needing to unlock your main display. The feature is truly handy. Due to big camera modules, most of us now habitually keep our phones face down. This Insta screen on the Agni 3, lets you manage your notifications and calls, without even needing to pick up the phone. When you are using the rear camera, the Insta screen also acts as a viewfinder so that you can use your primary camera for selfies.
But here's arguably the cutest thing about the Lava Agni 3 — Fiery, the furry friend. Fiery is an animated character that Lava has made for the Agni 3's Insta screen. Fiery is installed with 14 lifelike animations that show up every time you wake up the Insta screen.
There's more.
The Lava Agni 3 has another premium feature that only the recent iPhone models sport: the Action Key. Similar to the Action Button on iPhone, the Lava 3's Action Key can be customised. By default, single click has been allocated to screenshot, double click to flashlight and long press to switch between silent and ringer mode. But all these actions can be customised.
Beautiful display
The Lava Agni 3 sports a curved 6.78-inch AMOLED display with 120Hz refresh rate. The curved display not only gives it a premium look but also makes the viewing experience better. Curved displays also mean minimal bezels. Binge watching on the Lava Agni 3 has been a delight. It is smooth and bright enough to show vivid colours even under direct sun.
That said, curved displays have their problems. Accidental touches are the bane of the curved display's existence, and you face them on Lava Agni 3 as well. Many times, holding the phone in landscape, I accidentally touched the display edges, causing the video to pause or an app to close. That's an issue you might also face while gaming on the device. To be fair, this is not specific to this device — it's just a characteristic of curved displays.
Overall though, I love the Agni 3's display. It is highly responsive, with a fast-reacting in-display fingerprint sensor. It has a punch-hole camera design on the front, which is complemented by slim and even bezels around the edges.
Smooth performance
I have been using the Lava Agni 3 for a week and its performance has been impressive. The phone is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 chipset, paired with 8GB RAM. The phone offers a smooth app transition, and (almost) no lags. I experience no issues while testing the device on daily tasks like scrolling through social media, making calls, switching through multiple apps, and texting. I also did not observe excessive heating on the device, but you will notice slightly higher temperature on the device while charging.
I also ran a few benchmark tests on the device. In the single-core benchmarking test on Geekbench, the device scored 1075. In the multi-core test, it clocked 2076. Even in the 3D Mark Wildlife test, which is a gaming test, the phone achieved a stability score of 99.6 per cent and best loop score of 3,311. While its close competitor, the OnePlus Nord CE 4 has slightly better benchmark scores, in real life, the Agni 3 gives you no reason to complain.
The Agni 3 runs on Android 14. The company offers 3 years of Android updates. It comes with no excess bloatware, except for the suite of Google Apps.
Rear camera is awesome
The Lava Agni 3 boasts a quad-camera setup: 50-megapixel primary (OIS), 8-megapixel ultrawide, 8-megapixel telephoto (3x zoom), and 16-megapixel front camera. The rear camera is perfect for capturing clear and crisp images, but the front camera could have been better. Like its competition, the Lava Agni 3 also has AI-powered camera features to deliver Instagram-ready photos. The good news is that the AI does not saturate the images and keeps them as close to the natural colour as possible.
Day-time shots are impressive. For instance, the image clicked by the Lava Agni 3 below shows crisp and beautiful colours in the broad day-light.
But what surprised me was the night mode. The phone is designed to identify when you are in a poorly-lit environment and automatically switch to night mode. This mode is capable of clicking pretty pictures even at night.
The Portrait mode also impresses. I used it on both the front and back cameras, and the edge detection is bang on.
But here's the little speed breaker. The images taken from the front camera of the Agni 3 aren't that impressive. They are a bit noisy and lack dynamic range. But if you look at the bigger picture, the Lava Agni 3's camera is largely impressive. Take a look at the camera samples here.
Battery easily lasts a day
The Lava Agni 3's 5,000mAh battery easily lasts a day. My smartphone usage pattern usually ranges between medium to heavy. I watch a lot of Netflix shows and movies on my phone — a minimum of one episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. I am always active on WhatsApp and Instagram, and I parallelly have my work apps like Outlook and an analytics app running through the day. With all that, the phone's battery lasted a little over a day.
The battery experience is made better by the phone's 66W fast charging support. The phone changes from 0 to 100 per cent in no more than 60 minutes. The retail box comes with a power delivery (PD) charger. The technology is more efficient and results in faster charging times over the other combinations.
Lava Agni 3: Is it worth it?
The Lava Agni 3 is available at a starting price of Rs 20,999 and with bank offers, the price further reduces to Rs 19,999. At this price, the phone offers some stand out features like an iPhone-like Action key, and a secondary display. And these features aren't just gimmick, they carry a lot of functionality and give the phone an edge over its competitors in the sub-25K price segment. The device also has beautiful design, a long-lasting battery and solid performance. Lava has impressed us with the Agni 3, and we recommend you to consider this one.