YU Televentures last month launched its first premium flagship
smartphone the YU YUTOPIA at an event in New Delhi. Priced
at Rs. 24,999, the phone is a direct competition to OnePlus 2
with even better specifications on paper and seems very
promising as well. But is it really worth? We find out in our
detailed review.
Build and Design
Starting with the design of YUTOPIA, it follows similar design
language as the other YU smartphones excluding their first
launch – the YU YUREKA. The metal unibody YUTOPIA feels
extremely solid and premium in hands. Unfortunately it only
comes in a single grey colour.
Upfront, the YUTOPIA features a 5.2-inch 2K display panel.
The secondary 8-megapixel front facing selfie camera along
with earpiece grill, and proximity and ambient light sensors sit
above the display.
The three touch buttons (Back, Home and Menu) sit within the
display. The notification LED is in the bottom center of the
display.
The power / lock button can be found sandwiched between
two volume rocker keys on the right side, just like the YU
YUPHORIA or YU YUNIQUE. The keys don’t have good tactile
feedback.
Left edge of the handset has the SIM card tray which is a
hybrid slot, the secondary SIM slot doubles up as a microSD
card slot. The top edge has got the 3.5mm audio jack. The
bottom features the Micro-USB charging / data syncing port.
The metal back sports matte finish and doesn’t attract
fingerprints/ smudges. The big 21-mgeapixel camera module
along with the dual-LED setup sits in the center-top. The
fingerprint scanner sits just below the camera followed by the
YU branding and loudspeaker grill at the bottom.
Overall, the handset is quite compact and measures 147 x 73 x
7.2mm. It weighs 159 grams. The phone is definitely solid and
premium, but we personally didn’t like the single grey colour.
Display
The YU YUTOPIA features a 5.2-inch Quad-HD (1440 x 2560
pixels) OGS display with Corning Concore Glass, 1000:1
Contrast Ratio and 91% NTSC color gamut.
We found display to be very sharp and vivid. Though it is
glossy and attracts fingerprints/ smudges, we still found it less
reflective because of good screen brightness. The ‘bright
sunlight mode’ makes the screen lit up a little more for
viewing under direct Sunlight, though it would have been better
if Auto brightness mode could do that without us having to
enable it manually.
The 5-inch 2K panel appears less saturated and reproduces
colours close to natural. The viewing angles as well as
Sunlight legibility is excellent otherwise. So overall we found
the display performance of YUTOPIA to be quite satisfactory
for a smartphone in this price range.
Performance and Software
Inside, the YUTOPIA packs an Octa-Core 64-bit Qualcomm
Snapdragon 810 SoC (4 x 2.0GHz + 4 x 1.5GHz) coupled with
Adreno 430 GPU and the best in class 4GB DDR4 RAM. The
software on top is Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop) based Cyanogen OS
12.1 and YU promises that the device will soon get the
Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which is already been tested by
Cyanogen.
The phone’s internal storage is 32GB, but users’ get about
22GB (22.21GB) free space upfront. It can also accommodate
an additional microSD card (up to 128GB). Users get an option
to move apps from phone to microSD card. The phone also
supports USB-OTG.
The YU YUTOPIA on papers is a very strong device, but in real
life performance the combination mostly lags because of
sluggish software on top. The implementation of Android
Lollipop based Cyanogen OS 12.1 isn’t smooth and will require
update for a fix. The complete look and feel of the layer is
different from stock Android. The app drawer is in alphabetical
list form and can be swiped up/ down.
Talking about the gaming performance, the heavy games like
‘Asphalt 8’ had no problems at all. Audio output for the game
or otherwise on loudspeaker is decent. YU ships a particularly
good 9.2mm driver in-ear headphone from ‘House of Marley’
called the Little Bird in the box. Output on the headphones is
extremely good, but doesn’t go loud enough. The phone also
has FM radio.
Fingerprint Scanner
The fingerprint scanner at the back is very disappointing. It
takes a little longer tap to recognize fingerprint, and most of
the time it failed on first attempt. Unlike Nexus Imprint, the
scanner doesn’t learn over time. But the only two good things
about the sensor is that it doubles up as tap switch for taking
selfies and can store up to five fingerprints. We were hoping
that scanner could also be used as tap switch for taking
images from the rear shooter, since you could always point it
towards you at take selfies from the rear 21-megapixel
camera, but unfortunately there is no option.
AroundYU service
YU has integrated a new service called ‘AroundYU’ which
basically is an aggregator service backed by iXigo and has
partners like Ola for cabs, Amazon and Snapdeal for shopping,
Zomato for food, and more. The service can be simply
accessed by swiping left from home screen just like Google
Now.
With AroundYu, users can either order food, shop, book a cab,
flight, hotel, bus or even train. It uses your phone’s location
and most things work based on that, in a form like Google
Now cards.
YU claims that this service can replace dedicated apps like
apps used for booking a taxi or flight or to order food, but we
felt the service to be quite amateur at this stage and it
couldn’t come anyway near to standalone app experience of
any service per say. Maybe company will keep updating the
service for good.
Camera
The YU YUTOPIA boasts of a 21-megapixel rear camera with
Sony Exmor RS IMX230 sensor, a 77.3-degree Wide Angle
Lens, dual-tone LED flash, OIS, and PDAF. The front camera is
of 8-megapixel OV8865 BSI-2 sensor camera with f/2.2
aperture.
The rear 21-megapixel shooter can capture really good shots
with precise details in daylight as well as artificial lighting
conditions or at night. The colour reproduction in images
appears close to natural and sharp. The rear camera can even
record 4K UHD videos. Talking about the 8-megapixel selife
camera, it had a lot of detailing, but sometimes we saw it
behave oddly and produce more hazy images than rear.
The auto-focus and tap-to-focus is slightly slow in both
cameras, and so as the shutter speed. Although there is a no
delay mode in settings that you’ll need to enable if you want
to capture images instantly. Changing camera modes just
requires a simple swipe up and down, which is convenient.
Other than that there are not many optional tweaks in the
camera settings, so a third-party camera app would be a
better workaround. Overall, we feel the cameras on YUTOPIA
aren’t exceptionally great, but slightly above average.
Connectivity and Battery life
The YU YUTOPIA is a dual Hybrid-SIM device that can either
accommodate a Nano-SIM card or a microSD card in SIM 2
slot, whereas the SIM 1 is standard Micro-SIM slot. Both SIM
slots support 4G LTE for Band 3 (FDD-LTE 1800MHz) and
Band 40 (TDD-LTE 2300MHz) in India. Other connectivity
options include dual-band WiFi 802.11ac (Dual Band),
Bluetooth 4.1 and GPS. The phone also includes quite a few
sensors than a standard smartphone – such as G-sensor, L-
sensor, P-sensor, 6- axis Gyroscope, Electronic compass,
Barometer, Hall Sensor and Fingerprint sensor.
The handset is backed by a non-removable 3000mAh battery,
which also supports Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0 – claimed
to charge the device from 0 to 60% in just 30 minutes. We
also found that claim to be correct.
About the battery life, it could easily run through a full-day if
you are a mild to average user, but for power users it’ll not
serve as per expectations. Especially with the 2K display
onboard, company should have used a bigger battery instead.
One good thing is that the battery can quickly charge.
Verdict
Overall, the YU YUTOPIA is a great attempt from an Indian
smartphone maker. The smartphone is extremely solid and is
quite a looker, although we hope YU gets more colours for the
device. Now, in terms of why we think that the phone is not
worth considering because of the price segment it belongs to.
The great specifications on paper do not completely convert it
to real life performance and it is sluggish after all. The phone
has decent cameras overall and sports quick charge 2.0.
Although, going forward we would have liked the smartphone
with USB Type-C instead of Micro-USB.
Pros
Build quality
Display
Camera
House of Marley Little Bird In-Ear Headphones
Cons
Disappointing Fingerprint Scanner
Sluggish Software
Hybrid SIM 2 slot
