The budget smartphone market in India is at its hottest stage right now! Every single day we hear about some new mashup of software and hardware to give a visual as well as technical treat to us. Just like that we have now one more contender in the market, YU Yuphoria. It has a hardware punch, which it couples with what YU claims to be a best in class design. Though every such claim should always be taken with a pinch of salt. A refreshing new design with good price range, the Micromax YU Yuphoria is giving it’s competitors a run for their money. Here’s our detailed review for the same;
Table of Contents
Build and Design of the YU Yuphoria:
With somewhat similar looks like the Nokia Lumia 925, which was a flagship smart phone for Nokia for 2013, Yuphoria is arguably the most well-built smart phone that you can get under INR 10,000. Relatively slim and measuring only 9.35mm at its thickest point, without a battery it only weighs around 104 grams. With its nice round edges, this phone can also be used by only a single hand.
While the design and built is of good quality, but there is some trickiness when it comes to volume and lock screen buttons. On the right side of the power button is positioned flush between the two volume rockers. That means while using the phone you might end up hitting the wrong button quite often.
On the Camera front, the protruding lens looks a little tacky, also a weird new name given by YU i.e. “Saturn Ring”. The plastic quality of back cover may give quite a cheap feeling to its owners sometimes. Though the metal design has been touted as the killer feature but at the end of the day the whole design leaves something to be desired from the phone.
Display on Micromax YU Yuphoria:
With a pretty standard 72op resolution, the YU Yuphoria has a 5 inch HD IPS display. The quality of the screen is very good and also comes reinforced with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 to protect it from breaking. The colors are accurate in nature and very much true to life. With decent viewing angles, the colors aren’t so vibrant, but they look more natural. The screen is pretty much good for almost any task like watching videos, playing games an even reading text though. But under direct sunlight, brightness was not enough to overcome glare and display text sharply.
Performance:
With class leading internal components, YU Yuphoria offers more than anything in its class. Powered by New Qualcom Snapdragon 410 quad core 64 bit processor coupled with 2GB and DDR3 RAM and 16 GB of internal memory, one can also add external memory, thanks to the addition of the MicroSD card slot.
As per the price, performance is quite superb. It’s a complete value of money package. Credit goes to faster animations on CyanogenMod rather than the extra amount of RAM. Cyanogen 12 being the latest variant to run on Android Lollipop by default so users can move their apps to SD card to free up space.
With 15 apps running at the same time, the phone rarely lagged and overall performance was quite smooth. For the GPU, the phone is paired with the Adreno 306 GPU, which provides decent graphics and rather consistent frame rates. If you try and play games like Dead Trigger 2 and Asphalt 8, you will observe minimal frame rate drops.
Call quality and network performance was average and acceptable. Also, speakers of the phone were a bit too loud, might be okay for the Bollywood genre music, but for trance and heavy metal fans, the sound may be muffled and garbled.
Camera of the YU Yuphoria:
With an 8 megapixel camera, the YU Yuphoria has some potent imaging hardware. The camera also consists of f/2.2 aperture and a 5 element lens system. In good lighting, the back camera works OK, but in low light, it fails to impress its users.
You can see in our initial review and hands on video that the back camera though is an 8 MP camera but still doesn’t have the clarity or punch of say, the Redmi 2.
But, the front camera is a different story all together. A 5 megapixel camera clicks better quality selfies. The video feature is a little bit disappointing as it struggles to change focus when the user or their hand moves. Also, the video quality is pretty average and comes along with a lot of shake and digital noise in them.
Storage and Battery Life:
The 2,230 mAh battery on the phone will last through your typical work day. It lasts around 14-15 hours on an average, so if you start using it at 8:00 AM, it will work throughout the day.
The YU Yuphoria also comes with quick charge feature, which enables the device to charge at a rapid speed too.
Software on the Micromax YU Yuphoria:
The big deal about the YU Yuphoria is that it runs on Android lollipop with CyanogenMod 12. Which means that you get more customisable options with fast and fluid user interface which runs trouble free.
The YU Fit application that comes with the Yuphoria and allows users to pair it with the YU Fit band as well as use it with the YU Health is also a good thing and a welcome addition to the smartphone.
Unlike other Android phones in the market, the YU Yuphoria is clutter free when it comes to the OS. Meaning that it doesn’t come with a lot of unwanted apps that can’t be removed. In fact, CynogeMod12 comes with lots of interesting apps like Baton for sharing content, a unified gallery app and an email client by a box which is any day better than Gmail. But still for those who don’t like those apps they have the option to remove them.
In terms of customisation, you can manually add shortcuts for actions in the notification shade quick action bar. There is also an app themer which changes the look of individual apps in accordance to the theme that you have applied.
Conclusion:
Overall the Yuphoria is a decent smartphone considering the fact that it’s only priced at INR 6999 and right now it’s available via flash sales on Amazon.in website. Add to this fact that the phone comes with a latest variant of Android with the goodness of Cyanogen mod built into it then it makes the deal even more sweeter. The let downs are the somewhat out of the place design and the camera but if you are willing to sacrifice on those fronts then the phone almost gives you more than what you could get for this price.
Watch our full initial hands on video review of this device below and don’t forget to comment your views here, if you liked this post then head up top and do subscribe to Inspire2rise for more such awesome posts sent straight to your inbox!
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Will Yuphoria get OTG support from next update.