Yu Yunique First Impressions

Yu Televentures, a Micromaxsubsidiary that came in to existence last year, on Tuesday revealed its fourth budget smartphone, the Yu Yunique. Priced at 4,999, the Androidhandset brings 4G support to a new low price, putting renewed pressure on its competitors. As a low-priced 4GLTE smartphone, the Yu Yunique has its share of hits and misses.

First things first; Yu has carried forwarded the design profile of its previously launched Yuphoriasmartphone to the Yunique. At first, the Yunique looks like a miniature Yuphoria. It has the same design profile, minus the Yuphoria's metallic sides. The Yu Yunique's power button is positioned between the volume buttons on the right, and for some reason they are joined together. This might make it difficult for users to find the power button at first. Also, while holding the handset, our fingers often landed on top of the rear camera lens, resulting in smudges.

The primary camera has the same Saturn Ring design as the Yuphoria's. Although the removable plastic back has a long speaker grill near the bottom, the actual speaker is smaller and placed in one corner. Users can replace the rear panel, but the 2000mAh battery is not removable. The back panel exists only to cover the two SIM card slots and microSD card slot.

The Yu Yunique is likely to be welcomed by most users as the compact size of 134.50x67.50x8.30mm results in a good grip. All corners of the display are easy to reach with one thumb. The 4.7-inch HD (720x1280-pixel) screen is protected by Coring Gorilla Glass 3, which only a few smartphones use at this price level. This is more than users would usually get in a sub-Rs. 5000 handset. The smartphone also has on-screen Android navigation buttons instead of capacitive ones.

On the software front, the Yu Yunique is indeed unique in the Yu lineup as it runs Android 5.1 Lollipop and notCyanogen OS out-of-the-box. Until now, all of Yu's smartphones have come with Cyanogen OS. Interestingly, the company says users can flash Cyanogen OS 12.1 onto this device if they want.

Being the company's first ever pure Android smartphone with almost zero bloatware, it runs most applications without hiccups or lags. However, the 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor and 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM were not able to run things very fluidly once we started multitasking with several apps open on the device. There were instances when it took three or four seconds to bring up an app after tapping its icon on the home screen. However, with normal usage, the Yu Yunique was able to run fine most of the time.

The new Yu smartphone features 8GB of inbuilt storage, which leaves a little more than 4GB free for users. However, since the company has provided an expansion slot, the inbuilt storage should not be a huge limitation.

The camera interface is simple and easy to operate, but slightly cluttered with a line of icons placed on one side of the display, and the shutter button, camera, video and panorama switching modes on the other side. A list of modes and features covers nearly half the display in one long overflow menu. The camera performed fine in daylight and should be satisfactory for those spending only Rs. 4,999 on a smartphone. Low-light performance was disappointing though, even with HDR mode enabled. The final images seemed to have a slightly yellowish tint for some reason. Some of the options we found in the menu are flash mode, storage location, picture size, picture quality, timer, continuous shot, and face detection.

The company claims its 2,000mAh non-removable Li-Po battery can deliver up to 7 hours of talk time and up to 271 hours of standby time. However, we are yet to run it through our comprehensive battery test and see if it can really deliver on those claims. We predict that the battery won't be a disappointment on the Yu Yunique, which has light specs that won't demand much power.

All said and done, the Yu Yunique has some negative and positive aspects, both of which a user should expect in a sub-Rs 5,000 smartphone. However, at the same time it is quite rare to find an 8-megapixel rear camera, near-5-inch HD display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection, and most important of all, pure Android 5.1 Lollipop with zero bloatware at such a pocket-friendly price tag. Stay tuned for our full review.

Yu Yunique

• Key Specs
• News

Display

4.70-inch

Processor

1.2GHz

Front Camera

2-megapixel

Resolution

720x1280 pixels

RAM

1GB

OS

Android 5.1

Storage

8GB

Rear Camera

8-megapixel

Battery capacity

2000mAh

Micromax's Yu5050, Yu4711 Smartphones Leaked Ahead of Tuesday Launch

Micromax's Yu Televentures is holding a press conference on for a new smartphone launch on Tuesday, and two new Yu smartphones have been leaked ahead of it. Dubbed the Yu5050 and Yu4711, both the smartphones have been spotted in Geekbench listings tipping a few details on specifications. The Yu5050 has also been leaked via an Indian import/ export manifest site.

The leaked Geekbench listing claims that Yu Yu5050 be a high-end device will, unlike previous Yu smartphones. It is said to feature a 1.5GHz octa-core Snapdragon 810 (MSM8994) processor coupled with 4GB of RAM. The listing also hints that the handset will feature a 5.2-inch full-HD display and will run Android 5.1.1 Lollipop-based build of CyanogenOS. The Yu5050 is seen scoring 1353 in single-core test and 4622 in the multi-core test.

The Indian import/ export site, Zauba,lists the Yu5050 featuring dual-SIM support; a 5.2-inch display, and microSD card support. The Micromax Yu5050 smartphones were shipped from China, and had a declared value of Rs. 20,295 to Rs. 20,752. To be noted is that import/ export website price listings are only declared values, and usually are not accurate reflections of actual market price.

Micromax Canvas Xpress 2 Review: Priced to Kill

Smartphone prices are dropping rapidly, and it's now possible to get a well-specced device for well under Rs. 10,000. A lot of major smartphone brands are taking this segment seriously, and there are some impressive options available, giving budget buyers serious value for their money. Naturally, the segment would not be complete without Micromax, one of India's top smartphone makers.

The latest budget smartphone from Micromax is the Canvas Xpress 2, which is available exclusively through Flipkart. At Rs. 5,999, it's one of Micromax's cheapest offerings, and has an impressive spec sheet. It also competes directly with the Karbonn Titanium Mach Five (Review |Pictures). We go into detail and find out everything there is to know about the Xpress 2 in our review.

Look and feel
The Micromax Canvas Xpress 2 may be a budget device, but at first glance it appears to be anything but that. Although the device is entirely plastic, the gold strip along the sides appears metallic and gives the phone a premium feel. The 5-inch screen, thin bezels and slimness keep the phone compact and easy to handle, while the use of plastic keeps the weight down as well.

The back of the Xpress 2 features a matte finish, with the camera, flash and logo in a line down the middle from top to bottom. The Micromax logo is gold and designed to match with the gold finish on the sides. This looks great, and adds to the premium vibe that the phone is going for. The volume rocker and power key are on the right edge, the MicroUSB port is on the bottom along with the speakers, and the 3.5mm socket is at the top. On the whole, it's a simple, elegant and classy design that works for the Xpress 2.

The screen of the Micromax Canvas Xpress 2 measures 5 inches from corner to corner, and has a 720x1280 pixel resolution. This makes for a density of 294 pixels per inch, which keeps things sharp and detailed. The screen itself has good colour reproduction, brightness and sunlight legibility. What really stands out is the motion-handling ability of the Xpress 2, which makes for smooth, flowing video, even at high encoding rates. It's an excellent display for the price.

Specifications and software
For a budget device, the Micromax Canvas Xpress 2 has a decent spec sheet. Apart from the previously mentioned 5-inch 720p screen, the device features a 2,500mAh user-replaceable battery, a 1.4GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6592M SoC, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage (expandable by 32GB with a microSD card), and dual-SIM connectivity with 3G support on the primary SIM slot.

It's important to note that while the internal storage is claimed to be 8GB, the actual amount of space listed by the device is just shy of 5GB. This makes for just slightly over 4GB of actual user-accessible storage. While media can be stored on a microSD card, you might have space issues when downloading and installing games and apps.

The Micromax Canvas Xpress 2 runs Android 4.4.2 (KitKat), at a time when the vast majority of sub-Rs. 10,000 Android smartphones come with Android 5.0 (Lollipop). A sticker on the box states that the Canvas Xpress 2 is upgradeable to Android Lollipop, but a quick check on the system update screen shows that no such update is available yet.

The user interface is minimalistic and closely resembles the stock UI of Android KitKat. There's very little in the way of customisation, but all the basic settings and controls are present. With the price in mind, we found the user interface to be efficient and comfortable, and the audience for this device isn't likely to be disappointed.

The Micromax Canvas Xpress 2 comes with a large bouquet of pre-installed apps and services. The system also pushes advertisements onto your phone, which can be extremely irritating. Fortunately, most of these apps can be uninstalled. The apps that cannot be uninstalled are App Center, an app marketplace full of apps pushed by Micromax; and M!Live, a shortcut which essentially only opens Micromax's website on your smartphone.

Camera
The Canvas Xpress 2 features a 13-megapixel primary camera and a 2-megapixel secondary camera. While this makes for very high-resolution pictures, the sensor seems to have serious issues with detail and sharpness. While pictures appear great at first, zooming in reveals serious flaws the ability of the sensor to accurately capture pictures.

However, colour and lighting are handled well. Open-environment images are usually free of noise and have excellent white levels, so colours don't appear to be washed out and oversaturated. Low-light shots are satisfactory at best, but it's unfair to expect more than this of a device in this price range.

(Click to see full-size image)

The camera application is almost identical to Google's popular Camera app, and as a result has all settings and modes conveniently placed around the screen. Easy settings for flash, camera switching and various modes, as well as quick access to video and gallery are the highlights here. The only complaint is a slightly small viewfinder area, due to the presence of large black bars at the edges of the screen.

Performance
The Micromax Canvas Xpress 2 is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to performance. While the device performed admirably with our test videos and in our usual suite of benchmarks, it was less satisfactory with day-to-day performance and gaming. Issues with the device included sluggishness with the user interface, considerable delay when opening apps, and lag issues while gaming. Graphics- and processor-intensive games such as Angry Birds 2 and Dead Trigger 2 did not work smoothly, with lag often interfering with the gameplay. Both games also heavily drained the battery of the device and caused slight heating issues.

Benchmark scores were higher than we expected from a phone in this price range. AnTuTu and Quadrant returned scores of 28,560 and 10,864 respectively, while GFXBench and 3DMark produced scores of 16fps and 6,365 each. Although the device was usually satisfactory in terms of benchmark scores, real-world performance issues cropped up too often to ignore.

The phone's basic functions worked without any trouble. Call quality, signal strength and Wi-Fi strength were all decent. Sound output from the speaker was slightly below par, however. A big disappointment was the Xpress 2's performance in our battery test. The phone ran for only 6 hours, 5 minutes in our video loop test, and general battery consumption seemed to be much higher than it should be. The phone had trouble lasting even a whole day with ordinary usage, and needed to be plugged into a charger by evening.

Verdict
The entry-level smartphone segment is an important place to be for manufacturers, and Micromax is trying to make its presence felt with the Canvas Xpress 2. The device looks good, is compact and easy to handle, and has all of the basics firmly in place. It offers specifications that you'd expect to see on phones that cost a lot more, which makes it an attractive option for budget buyers.

However, when compared to the identically-priced Karbonn Titanium Mach Five, it has some flaws. Sub-par performance with graphically intensive tasks and general sluggishness with running apps and games are its biggest weaknesses. The camera, while better on paper, is actually poor in capturing detail and definition. RAM and internal storage are both on the low side, which will affect general usability of the device. Above all, the device has no standout features or USPs.

If you're looking for a simple entry-level smartphone that looks good, the Micromax Canvas Xpress 2 is a viable option. It will serve you well if you stick to basic tasks and use only it for occasional photography. However if you're looking for a bit more, we suggest you either consider the Karbonn Titanium Mach Five, or spend a bit more and pick up a Yu Yuphoria.