Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

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The original Yu Yureka is only a mere five months old, and yet it's already out of fashion to make way for the new Yu Yuphoria handset.

 

Rating:
4.0/5

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

You might feel that YU Televentures, a division of Indian handset maker Micromax, is making a habit of fast churning epic phones, the good news is that the latest Yu Yuphoria is amazing.

 

The Yu Yuphoria sets a new bar for design, and manages to impress us more than most other smartphones in the budget segment without cutting back on features or power.

Existing Yu Yureka owners may not find enough here to merit an immediate upgrade, but anyone looking for a new phone should seriously consider this Yu Yuphoria.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

At Rs. 6,999, the Yu Yuphoria is a serious contender to the existing Xiaomi Redmi 2 and the Lenovo A6000.

We've had got a chance to spent some quality with the newly launched Yu Yuphoria, and here are our first impressions.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: Form Factor, Design, Display and Operating System

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

While the Yu Yuphoria undeniably looks just like the Nokia Lumia 925, a closer inspection reveals it's actually a slightly different device.

The standout design features of the Yu Yuphoria are its smooth and shiny metal-clad sides, and gentle removable plastic back. The metallic band on the sides offer luxurious feel and has smooth rounded edges.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

The right edge of the phone features the three standard metal buttons - a power key housed between the volume rocker keys. We personally didn't like the placement, but isn't really a deal breaker.

You'll also notice that there are two small bands on both the top and bottom edge of the handset that feature the 3.5mm headset jack and the micro-USB port, and also double as the antenna.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

On the plastic-made black, you'll find an 8MP-megapixel camera with an LED Flash. The dark circle around the camera lens is reminiscent of the Lumia 830.

Finally, there's an entry-level Android handset that doesn't make me miss anything about the Xiaomi Redmi 2. It's called the Yu Yuphoria, and it's the best Android phone I've ever laid hands on.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

The Yu Yuphoria has a compact sized 5.0-inch, 1280 x 720-pixel display. In our brief testing, the Yuphoria showed off deep, saturated colours and displayed great viewing angles. Its screen is bright and vibrant with a sharp 720p HD display. It even looked bright under direct sunlight while sunglasses.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

The phone runs Cyanogen OS 12, a customised version of Android 5.0 Lollipop designed and developed by Cyanogen. This gives the Yuphoria a clean and minimalist look. Cyanogen OS 12 offers enhanced performance; also the look and feel is very close to stock Android UI.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

Being powered by Cyanogen OS 12, you don't have to worry about customization. Plus, the native OS also features App Themer and Truecaller dialer integration.

At the top of the screen, accessed via the pull down notification bar are a selection of quick settings. Overall, the phone is quite impressive in terms of running software.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: Performance and Connectivity

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

The Yu Yuphoria features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chip running at 1.2GHz. The phone also features 2GB of RAM and 16GB of flash memory, with storage expansion up to 128 GB via the microSD slot. This obviously allows the Yu Yuphoria to keep up with other budget phones, and it has no trouble running a wide variety of apps.

The 1.2GHz quad-core chipset and 2GB of RAM powering the device has no trouble keeping pace, and we didn't see any delay in opening or switching between applications.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

In terms of connectivity, the phone supports dual-SIM, 3G, 4G TDD-LTE, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: Cameras

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

Our biggest complaint about the Yu Yuphoria is its back camera. Its back camera offers an 8-megapixel shooter, but it seemed to be an average affair. Pictures come out somewhat grainy and full of background noise. We'll have a comprehensive look at the camera in our full review.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

The front-facing 5-MP camera did a decent job of capturing details in my shirt. In our brief time, we were impressed by the phone's front-facing shooter.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

Videos taken by the rear camera were crisp, and the Yu Yuphoria can shoot all the way up 1080p video at 30 fps. It can also record slow motion video too.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: Battery and Early Verdict

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

With its 2230mA battery, you should probably get at least 10 hours of backup. At this point, it's too early to get into a rough estimate without testing the phone's real world performance.

Yu Yuphoria First Look: The Best all-round Budget Smartphone

To be honest, the Yu Yuphoria is easily among the front-running budget Android handsets I can think right now. As a consumer, this is the one handset I'd like to buy. While it doesn't have monster specifications, the Yu Yuphoria is worth some serious consideration.

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