YU YUREKA REVIEW
Brand name has become a strong indicator in mobile sales. Micromax, the leading smartphone manufacturer of India has altogether created a new brand 'YU' to make a strong statement among the consumers that quality connected with value is also their business. YU has launched their first phone Yureka. Well going by the name, lets see whether it delivers.
1.Brand Talk-
This phone is manufactured by YU, a sister company of Micromax. This is their first phone. This brand was created to make an impression along a mass audience and is marketed out of the shadow of Micromax.
2. Avatars in the Market-
There is only a single variety of this phone in the market i.e Moondust Grey colour with 16gb internal storage.
3. Out of the box-
The box is well crafted, design is basic and elegant.
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| Box Top |
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| Box Bottom |
All necessary information is printed on the box. There is no sign of Micromax on the box.
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| Box Opened |
On opening the box you can find the phone along with a complimentary scratch guard.
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| Items Given |
Inside we find the charger, headset and documentation.
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| Charger |
The charger is neat, with YU logo printed on it.
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| Headset |
The headset looks delicate, but produced good quality sound.
4. Design, Build Quality-
The phone is neatly crafted. It has smooth sand paper finish at the back and screen protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3. Its dimension are 154.8x78x8.8mm and weighs 155g. It is feels well seated in the hands compared to other 5.5" phones.
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| Phone Front |
On the front we have a front facing camera, besides it is the proximity sensor.
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| Phone Back |
On the back we have the rear facing camera and below is the flash. There is a sporty YU logo also.There are the speakers below.
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| Phone Right |
On the right hand side there is the power button.
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| Phone Left |
On the left hand side there is the volume rocker.
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| Phone Top |
On top there is the headphone jack.
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| Phone Bottom |
On the bottom there is a micro USB port.
Overall the phone is ergonomically built and is a no show off.
5.Features-
a)Screen-
This phone comes with a 5.5" 720x1280 resolution display. It is an IPS LCD display with 16M colours. It has a pixel density of 267 pixels per inch. Coming to the display performance, for this budget this is the best screen you would find on a smartphone. The colours are well balanced. The viewing angles are also good.
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| Screen |
b)Performance-
This is a budget smartphone and you may think the specs to be very moderate, but that is not the case. This phone comes with an Octa-core processor (Quad Core 1.7 GHz Cortex A-53 & Quad Core 1 GHz Cortex A-53) on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 chipset. This chipset is of the 64 bit architecture, hence RAM handling in this phone will be more optimized than other 32 bit smartphones. It has Adreno 405 graphics chip running at 550MHz. It has 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 16GB of internal storage with support for microSB slot.Coming to the performance, the touch was very snappy. The phone can handle most of the graphic intensive games at ease. But prolonged gaming can cause the phone to heat.Coming to the benchmarks, we ran this phone with a series of bench mark softwares. Geekbench 3 gave a single core score of 660 and multi core score of 2474.We ran AnTutu Benchmark and it gave a score of 31,661. Quadrant standard gave a score of 16896.These scores are very good considering the fact that this phone beat its near rival the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G in all the tests.
c) Connectivity, Call Quality, Speakers-
This phone is a dual SIM phone (Micro SIM) . It has 4G support with TD-LTE band support which is present in India. The 4G support is only for one SIM at a time, which means at an instant you can use 4G on any one SIM.It supports Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS. There is no NFC support.
The call quality was excellent, you can hear the voice even in noisy surroundings. The microphone quality is decent which means that those who are hearing you will not be dissatisfied by your voice quality. The speaker is not that loud.I played a song and the sound loudness was average. So if you are in a busy street it may be difficult hearing ringtones for incoming calls.
d) Software-
This is an important talking and selling point of this phone. The phone comes with Android 4.4.4 with Cyanogen Mod OS11. Cyanogen makes custom UI for phones and updates them every week. The Yureka is the only device in India which has Cyanogen Mod which is updatable. Cyanogen has promised that it would be rolling out Android 5.0 for this device.In Cyanogen Mod you can customize each and every visual feature of your phone. There are lot of themes for downloading.
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| Properties |
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| Settings |
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| Themes |
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| Apps Installed |
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| App Drawer |
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| Dropdown Notification |
The software that comes with the device are standard. There is no much bloatware. The extra softwares given are AudioFX, YUniverse Browser and Baton. AudioFX allows you to apply sound presets.
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| AudioFX |
There are many options like to what you have to apply presets for ex. Headphones, Speaker etc.
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| YUniverse Browser |
YUniverse is a browser created by Micromax, nothing great to mention.
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| Baton |
Baton is a cloud sharing app.
e) Battery-
This phone comes with a 2500mAh Li-Po Battery. It is user replaceable which is good. The battery life is decent. You should get around one day of battery life with normal usage. If you are using a lot of 3G data and keeping the screen on, you might need to charge again between the day.
f) Photo,Music,Video and Camera-
There is a dedicated gallery app to view your photos. For video you have to use Google's Play Movies app. For Music again you have to use Google's Play Music App.The music and video player are basic with standard functions.
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| Gallery |
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| Rear Camera |
Now coming to the camera, this phone sports a 13MP rear camera with Sony Sensor with AF ability having LED Flash.
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| Rear Camera View |
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| Front Camera |
The front camera is a 5MP sensor. The phone with the rear camera takes some great photos with good sharpness and colour balance.
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| Camera Options |
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| Camera Options 2 |
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| Camera Options 3 |
The front camera is also good, gives a good sharpness and is useful for selfies. The videos captured are of 1080p and are of decent quality.
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| FM Radio |
There is also FM Radio built in to this phone, which is nice.
g) Warranty-
This phone comes with 1 year on-site warranty, which means the company is ready to service your phone at your home location. This is a certain plus given by Micromax.
h) Availability and Pricing-
Wooh! This is an interesting topic. This phone is available for Rs.8999/- exclusively on Amazon.in . To purchase this mobile you have to register for the weekly sale and buy the phone usually within a time frame of 4-5 seconds before it is out of stock.
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| YU Yureka Sale on Amazon.in |
The demand for the phone is very high. People are reselling this phone on sites like ebay and OLX for a price of Rs.11,000/- to Rs.13,000/-.
i) Conclusion-
Well coming to the conclusion, this is a well crafted phone with decent specs and a well affordable price tag. With on-site warranty, dual sim and LTE this smartphone is a winner.We liked most of the aspects of this phone leaving aside the speaker sound.With the era of budget smartphones now, YU Yureka certainly stands tall amongst them.
