Performance is where the Panasonic Eluga Arc is most disappointing. The phone crashed regularly during our time with it, often when faced with simple and uncomplicated tasks. Reasons that caused the phone to inexplicably reboot included playing 1080p video, attempting to run third-party camera apps installed from Google Play, and running regular browser-based benchmark tests. We cannot say for certain whether these problems are limited to our review unit.
Even when the phone isn't crashing, it's still sluggish and unpleasant to use. Unlocking the phone, navigating around the interface, running apps and browsing the Internet are all slow and frustrating, and indeed nothing actually works well. We ran the phone through our suite of benchmark tests, and got scores of 9.9fps in GFXBench, 5346 in 3DMark Ice Storm, 27, 767 in AnTuTu and 13, 229 in Quadrant. The phone is comprehensively outdone by practically every other phone at this price level today in terms of performance.
Call quality is acceptable. The rear speaker provides sound that is a bit weak, but expected from a phone of this size. The phone is 4G capable, and usually manages to hold on to 4G networks with ease. The Eluga Arc ran for 8 hours, 9 minutes in our video loop test and a little less than a day in normal use, which is a bit less than what we would have liked.
