YU Yutopia Smartphone Review

YU Televentures started their venture *pun intended* in early 2015 with their mid-range budget smartphone Yu Yureka (which has now been replaced with a better version) followed by a few more smartphone releases and is now known for it’s budget smartphone line up which includes (Yureka Plus, Yuphoria and Yunique).

Recently YU though of jumping a level up and getting into the top-notch best in class flagship business and a few days ago they unveiled “The Beast” YU Yutopia. YU in more refined words claim that they have kicked every phones butt but let’s see if what they say is actually true or not…

DESIGN

If you have seen YU’s latest smartphones then you will be quiet familiar with the basic design language of this device. Taking all the design aspects from Yuphoria and improving them really makes the beast look quiet stunning. The device contains an all metal frame (Aluminium and Magnesium alloy) which the company claims to be made out of “Aircraft grade aluminum” and would make the phone pretty strong and sturdy, unfortunately this would mean no removable back.

Other than that we have the returning Saturn rings around the camera module which reminds me of some lumia devices, below that we have a fingerprint sensor following which we have the YU branding and the speaker at the bottom. Taking a look at the sides, we have the power button between the volume keys towards the right, sim tray on the left, 3.5 mm headphone jack up top and a micro-USB port on the bottom. You are probably wondering what those lines around the device are, well they are the antenna bands that are nicely placed and don’t mess with the smooth design.

On the front we have pretty standard stuff, YU branding below the earpiece beside which we have a front facing camera and a notification LED accompanied by a microphone at the bottom.
Overall the device is great looking and pleasing to the eye but I just have two concerns, that protruding camera hump and the all metal build feeling slippery in hand.

DISPLAY

The device comes with a 5.2inch Quad HD (2560X1440) resolution display resulting in a pixel density of 565 ppi. I only have one word for that “CRISP”. Other than the massive resolution we have a pure black touch panel which should help with the blacks as it’s an LCD panel.
The Corning Concore Glass should do fine and I know I’m stating the obvious but don’t drop your device, the OGS (One Glass Solution) in the Mi4i wasn’t that durable when it came to drops.

The device runs on Cyanogen OS 12.1 which ensures you use that display with a variety of functions,
LiveDisplay feature gives the display a tint based on the time of day which can be pleasing to they eye; double tap to wake and sleep make a return.
The display isn’t the best like the other flagships out there but is definitely great for the price.

HARDWARE

The device packs the latest and greatest when it comes to hardware. Powered by a Snapdragon 810 SoC (4x 2GHz Cortex A-57 cores, 4x 1.5GHz Cortex A-53 cores and Adreno 430 GPU) the device is smooth and snappy, if that isn’t enough then the 4GB RAM on board has no issues in multitasking what so ever. So without any worries you can be assured of great performance on “The Beast”.

The device features 32GB of internal storage which is expandable upto 128GB using a microSD.
The device also has a fingerprint scanner on the back which is a nice placement but I can’t comment on it’s accuracy until I test it myself.

CAMERA

Talking about the camera we have a 21MP shooter at the back and an 8MP shooter towards the front.
The rear camera (Sony Exmor RS IMX230 sensor) sounds pretty impressive on paper, having OIS on-board and a dual tone LED flash with other basic stuff like touch focus, face detection, HDR and panorama.

The device is capable of shooting 4K at 30FPS, it also offers time lapse and slow motion video recording in 1080p at 60FPS and 720p at 120FPS out of the box. The software goodness doesn’t end there, some other features include, Chroma Flash, OptiZoom, Steady Photo, Action and Night Modes.
The low light shots aren’t the best (Try the ChromaFlash) but in artificial and natural lighting it should perform well, and I would recommend using less of HDR mode though.

The front camera is what we saw on the rear of Yuphoria that is an f/2.2 aperture wide angle lens which clicks decent selfies in which you can easily have all your friends without the need of a selfie stick *assuming you click groupfies with a normal amount of people*.

BATTERY

The 3000mAh battery should suffice an average day of usage but if you go for heavy usage specially with all the high-end specs you might need a charger towards the end of the day.

Although that shouldn’t be a problem as the device uses Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0 technology that the company claims should charge the device up to 60% in 30 minutes also if running low on charge you can always use the in-built power saving feature in Android lollipop.

SOFTWARE

Last but again not the least is the software on this bad boy, Cyanogen OS makes a return and the Yutopia is running on COS 12.1 which is based on lollipop 5.1.1 with a cherry pick app on top “Around YU”.

If you have used Cyanogen OS or Cyanogen Mod in the past then you know just how lovely it is to be able to customize your device in numerous ways, ranging from sound to display to UI to themes to what not. For me it’s definitely the most preferred custom OS for any android device.

So Finally… Yay or Nahh?

Just like the OnePlus 2 the device may not be the most powerful smartphone on the planet but it definitely is one of it’s kind. It’s worth the price I would say if not more.