Panasonic Eluga dL1 review

This is actually Panasonic's first Android handset, a surprise for a company that competes with the likes of Samsung and Sony in most product areas. The Waterproof element of the Eluga is less of a surprise, as Panasonic has long been lauded for its waterproof and shockproof Toughbook laptops. The Eluga dL1 is dustproof, and can survive in water up to 1.5m deep for up 30 minutes. We asked Panasonic about its beer-repelling capabilities and they assured us that, stickiness aside, it would survive such a dunking.

The Eluga's slender body doesn't betray its waterproof nature. It's just 7.8mm thick, with a beautifully simple curved rear panel. The bezel around the display is one of the thinnest we've ever seen, measuring just 4mm along the edges. It's a great piece of engineering, with the 4.3in display fitted into a handset measuring just 123x62mm, compared to 131x68mm for the - hardly-bloated - Motorola RAZR. The Eluga is simply one of the best-looking smartphones we've ever tested.

At first glance then, the Eluga is impressive. However, when we thought about it and used it a bit more, the two key draws - style and waterproofing - don't quite gel together. For starters the curved rear panel makes it practically edgeless; which means it's not the easiest phone to keep hold of. If you want to avoid getting your phone wet, then the first line of defence is not to drop it in the first place, but the Eluga's design just makes it want to squirm out of your hand. Failing that, a second line of defence would be a lanyard, but there's no hole for one here. You could argue that the waterproofing makes such considerations unnecessary, but most swimming pools are deeper than 1.5m, and dropped objects have a habit of bouncing off hard things (like the pool side or the bath edge) before sploshing in. The Eluga isn't shockproof, nor does it claim to have a toughened glass screen to protect its display.

Not many ports or slots on the waterproof Eluga

Whether driven by waterproofing or a desire for a minimalist appearance, all the ports are concentrated on the top of the handset. There's a micro SIM slot, but no micro SD card slot, so you're limited to the 8GB of storage provided. The only other port is for micro USB, there's no HMDI output provided. Physical buttons are limited to power and volume, and are limited in size too. The rear position and tiny size of the power button was particularly aggravating, it being impossible to find and push without some fiddling about. You can unlock the phone by a long press on the touch-sensitive Home Button, but it’s a long-winded way to wake up the phone.

The button placement and size was among our biggest bugbears

Once unlocked, we once again appreciated the big 4.3in display that's been squeezed in here. It has a respectable 960x540 resolution, giving plenty of onscreen detail, though lagging behind the 1,280x720 resolution of the best screens now available. The OLED display is not the brightest we've seen, we're guessing it's been dialled down to improve on battery life, and we ended up overriding the automatic brightness in order to get the best contrast. Like the screens on the Motorola RAZR and HTC One S, it uses a Pentile pixel structure (with two subpixels per pixel instead of full RGB) and so the actual resolution is lower than stated. In compensation, OLED screens have far better contrast ratios and lower power consumption than their LCD competitio

Design

Design is one of the Eluga's strong points and certainly it's an area you can't afford to neglect ,given the number of great-looking devices out there. The Panasonic Eluga dL1 is certainly compact. The slim body is elegant and simple in its design, which has been growing on us as we've been using the phone.

There are some oddities, however. At the edges of the screen, the back curves away but the edges feel a little sharp. It does make it easy to grip and given the size of the phone it isn't a huge problem, but sharp edges seem to be the Eluga's thing.

The body is finished in plastics, the matte black rear staying mercifully free of fingerprints and dust, but it does feel slightly abrasive. This is a little odd at first, but after a week of use it no longer bothered us.

One thing that did remain irritating was the placement of the buttons. On the right-hand side of the device is the volume rocker and the standby button. Because of that sharp edge and the way the back curves away, these controls are moved around the back, making them somewhat awkward to pres

Hardware, display

The display offers you 4.3-inches of AMOLED display. While the blacks are nice and deep and the colours vibrant, AMOLED displays aren't the most natural looking by modern standards, with the colours overly saturated. The other downside is that as the screen dims it can look a little grubby, with whites looking untidy when you scroll pages up and down.

However, the resolution at 960 x 540 pixels is ample. It doesn't match the latest 1080 x 720 displays on devices like the Xperia S or the HTC One X, so whichever way you slice it, this isn't an Android phone at the top of the specs pile.

The same rings true of the remainder of the specs. The TI 1GHz dual core processor has plenty of power and the 1GB of RAM is welcomed, but the 8GB of internal memory is perhaps on the small side and the 1150mAh battery certainly is.

Software downfall

So the design has its good points and the hardware is reasonable. However, as a new entry into the Android world, the Eluga doesn't really impress when it comes to the software.

Launching on Gingerbread - ie, not the latest version of Android that you'll find on rival launch devices - is something of a problem. What you really notice is how dated the Eluga feels in everyday use. With Android 4.0 launching more than 6 months ago, some of the raw Gingerbread features lack shine, even if they are functional.

But Panasonic isn't just pitching out a raw Android device, it has made some customisations. It has changed the home pages and the lock screen, for example, but neither is especially engaging.

The lock screen offers a left or right swipe in an arcing motion to unlock the phone. That's fine, but there's a dearth of anything else. The stock music player doesn't appear there, you miss the direct access to notifications that Ice Cream Sandwich offers and there are no unlock shortcuts.