Hyve Buzz: An unique offering in a crowded market

The Buzz is from an Indian company, Hyve and unlike other companies, the phones genuinely has some unique features at this price point. The box itself is amazing. It opens from the top, and the phone is standing right there for you. Along with the phone, you get the accessories in a box which includes the charging adapter, a pair of headphones and an USB-C cable which is braided!

Design

The Hyve Buzz has a rubber curved back with really thin sides. This is unlike other curved phones. In this one, the whole back is curved and ideally you’d be holding the back of the phone. On the front, the phone has a 5.5 inch 1080P Screen (401PPI) with 2.5D Arc Glass which makes it all the more comfortable to use.

The buttons are placed on the curved back to the left. The volume rocker is placed first, and then the power button. It is incredibly easy to use these buttons if you are using the phone on your right hand, but if you use it on your left, the whole button placement is a hassle.

In the bottom, there’s the USB-C Port and the 3.5mm headphone jack on the top. Hyve Buzz is probably the only phone in this range which is waterproof. The phone has an IP X4 Waterproof Rating. For this reason, both the ports have rubber tags on them. These tags while keeping the phone safe from water damage, they are usually difficult to open. I had to claw through them every time.

On the right, there’s an opening for the SIM Tray. This is no Hybrid SIM Tray and unlike any that I’ve seen before. It holds two Micro-SIMs and one Micro SD card up to 128GB at the same time!

Coming to the back there’s the camera on the top with a slight budge it along with the dual-LED flash right next to it.

Right below the camera is the Hyve Logo, which is probably the coolest feature of the phone. To logo lights up when you get a call, and it is awesome!

Below the logo, there’s the fingerprint reader which performs pretty well and being a waterproof phone, it does work when it is wet. Way below that is a tiny speaker grill. The speaker is nothing special, but it is loud enough to receive calls.

If the waterproof design is not enough, the phone comes with one year Damage Protection plan which includes Water Damage(Don’t know how you’d manage to do that) and even screen breaks. Apart from the Damage protection plan, the Have Buzz comes with two years of warranty against Manufacturing defects. For warranty claims, they come, pick up the device from your place and drop it back once it is done. Servify provides this service.

Internals and Performance

The Hyve Buzz is not an entry level phone. Along with its amazing externals, it comes with some amazing internals too. The Hyve Buzz runs on an ARM Cortex A53 which is a 64-Bit Octa-Core Processor clocked at 1.5GHz. On the Graphics side, it runs on ARM Mali-T720. The phone has 3GB RAM which feels adequate for most of the tasks. For internal storage, the Hyve Buzz comes with 16 Gigs and is expandable up to 128GB via Micro-SD. One nice thing about the phone is that a 32GB Micro-SD card is included, totalling the storage of the phone to 48GB out of the box!

On the side, you have the SIM Tray which supports two Micro SIM and one Micro SD Card at the same time. The SIM Tray design is unique and something I’ve not seen before. Most of the phones come with a Hybrid Tray. Although the SIM Tray is unique, something I was baffled with was that both are Micro-SIM, and every SIM card I had was Nano! But one nice thing is that both SIMs support VoLTE, meaning they support Reliance JIO Network.

For other connectivity, the Hyve Buzz supports Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n (No ac) and Bluetooth 4.0.

Display

The Hyve Buzz comes with a 5.5 inch Full HD Display. It is an IPS LCD Screen with 401PPI. 1080P is good enough for everything and will be battery efficient. The text is crisp and visible under bright sunlight outdoors.

The best part of the display is its glass. It has a 2.5D Glass which is smooth and feels great to use.

Camera

The Have Buzz has a 13MP Primary Camera with Dual-Tone Flash and 5MP Secondary Camera. Both the cameras are pretty good and nothing out of the ordinary. It works well under bright conditions and average under low light. The camera is not bad, and it is just the way any mobile camera in this range is. This is no camera phone, but it performs well when you need it. Just don’t expect it to blow you away. Most of the companies oversell the camera part, and consumers get disappointed when it is nowhere close to their claims in real world usage. Hyve does not oversell the camera which is good.

Battery

Hyve Buzz comes with 2,500mAh Battery which was my biggest point of concern with the phone. All phones these days come with a minimum of a 3,000mAh battery. I had my doubts, and on using it for a few weeks I can confirm the battery is not satisfactory. I always had to charge it twice or even thrice a day when I used it as my primary device and barely lasted a full day as my secondary device. I was massively disappointed with the phone’s battery performance. The Hyve team said they’re working on an update to better optimise the battery and hope that helps. But right now, be prepared to charge your phone frequently. If it helps, the phone charges pretty fast.

Software

The Have Buzz runs on Android 5.1 (Will get an update to 6.0 soon) with Google’s Stock launcher. No customer launcher or bloatware here! The overall experience is smooth and snappy. There’s nothing out of the ordinary here except for one or two things. It has the default settings menu alone with an option to enable/disable the Have Logo on the back. The Logo only lights up when someone calls. It’s a shame that it cannot be used for anything more. I’d love it have it turned ON whenever the screen is active, just the way you have it on Mac.

Another additional feature to the Hyve Buzz is the Touch 2 Call feature. You can assign specific fingerprints to specific contacts. So for example, my right index finger unlocks my phone. Whereas my left index finger when scanned places a call to a contact of my choice. All of this happens in less than a second which is amazing and pretty useful.

Conclusion

The Hyve Buzz is a brilliant phone from an Indian company, offering things we’ve never seen before like the waterproofing, the unique SIM tray, Braided USB Cable and especially the Hyve logo on it’s back. The only downside to the phone is it’s battery which is not up to the mark. Another amazing part of the phone is it’s curved back and the overall design aesthetics which most of the companies do not care about. The Hyve Buzz feels great to hold and use.

Hyve Buzz is priced at Rs. 14,000 comes in two different colours: Twilight Black and Midnight Blue. The price segment it is in is extremely competitive. But the biggest advantage for Hyve is that it is unlike any other phone while every other phone in this segment is the same device, under a different skin. Hyve gets so many things right and if you feel it hits the sweet spot for you, go ahead and get it!