Kodak Ektra smartphone is aimed at photographers, but specs say otherwise

Kodak Ektra packs in a Mediatek SoC and decidedly drab camera tech.

Mark Walton – Oct 20, 2016 9:22 am | 59

Kodak, the once mighty American photography company, is hoping for a revival with the launch of Kodak Ektra, a smartphone named after its iconic 1940s rangefinder Ektra camera. It launches in December in the UK and Europe for a substantial £450—far more than the company’s debut smartphone the Kodak IM5, which launched at a more wallet-friendly £230 last year.

You do get a wee bit more for your money, though. The Ektra—which is built by manufacturer-for-hire Bullitt—is clad in an artificial “leatherette” material with metal sides, and features a curved grip and dedicated shutter button for a classic camera-like look. There’s a large circular lens arrangement on the back to complete the look, but disappointingly the sensor itself is typical small smartphone fare: a 21-megapixel unit from Sony.

So while the Ektra might look the part, it doesn’t feature anything as exciting as the 41MP sensor in Nokia’s Lumia 1020, or the full-blown zoom lens of Samsung’s Galaxy Camera. Instead, there’s the usual phase detect autofocus, 6-axis optical image stabilisation, and an f/2.0 lens. HDR and 4K video capture are also supported. The front-facing camera features a 13MP sensor and f/2.2 lens.

In a time where every big smartphone maker is itching to claim it has “the best smartphone camera in the world,” such humdrum tech isn’t going to get Kodak very far. Still, the company has worked on its own custom camera app, which features a digital “Scene Selection Dial” that lets you switch between portrait, manual, sports, bokeh, night, HDR, panorama, macro, landscape, and film/video modes.

Front and back of the new Kodak Ektra smartphone.

The camera app is tightly integrated with popular photo editing app Snapseed, allowing for swift edits with one tap. There’s also a “Super 8” video app that adds vintage-style filters to videos so you can bask in some sweet ’70s nostalgia.

The rest of the Ektra is your standard mid-range phone fare, with a Mediatek Helio X-20 SoC—which packs two high-performance 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU cores, eight low power Cortex-A53 cores, and a Mali-T880 GPU—3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage with microSD expansion, and a 5-inch 1080p display. It’s chunkier than your average phone, though, at 9.69mm thick. There’s also a decent non-removable 3000mAh battery inside. It comes loaded with Android 6.0 and—like the Cat S60 which is also built by Bullitt—is largely a stock Android experience.

It’s tough to imagine the Kodak Ektra brand has enough pull these days to lure potential purchasers, particularly as there’s little special about the phone’s photographic tech. Still, maybe the looks will sell it. After all, if you’re going to make a phone these days, might as well make it a niche one.

Now read our guide to the best smartphones of 2016.