Lava unveiled the Blaze today – a sub126 dollars phone that doesn’t feel cheap. It has a glass back, a first for the segment, according to the company. And the “free service at home” feels downright premium. The Lava Blaze runs stock Android 12 on a Helio A22 chipset. While not particularly powerful, this 12nm chip has 8x Cortex-A53 CPU cores and a PowerVR GE8300 GPU, just enough resources to run full-blooded Android (some phones in this segment resort to using Go Edition). The chipset is paired with 3GB of RAM (plus 3GB of virtual RAM) and 64GB built-in storage, which can be expanded using a microSD card. Lava is promising 2 years of security patches, but makes no mention of OS updates. The Blaze has a 6.5” display with 720 x 1,600px resolution. On the plus side, Lava picked an IPS LCD, rather than the cheapest panel it could find. Notched into the display is an 8MP selfie camera. It can do face unlock, though slowly (1.08s to trigger). The rear-mounted fingerprint reader is much faster (0.35s).

Moving to the rear, there is a 13MP main camera with LED flash. Okay, there are three cameras, but since the functionality of the other two isn’t listed, we assume they are macro and depth sensor modules. The phone is powered by a relatively large 5,000mAh battery that promises over 8 hours of YouTube streaming or 40 hours of talk time. Charging is done over USB-C at 10W. The other wired connection is the 3.5mm headphone jack and there is even an FM radio receiver (we don’t see many of those).