[Device Reviews and Information] MacArthur67:
UMI Hammer short review

I have bought a few Hammer for friends who wants a cheap and good value 4G phone and here's some of my thoughts about it after playing with it a few days, concentrating mainly on the issues others have talked about in this thread before. Let me first say that I think that for USD 120 now this is a really good value 5" 4G (B3, B7, B20) phone.

My ROM version: April 27

1. My phones came pre-rooted with SuperSU installed and had almost no bloatware. Worth buying the phone just for that and UMI should have a lot of praise for that I think.

2. The finish and build quality is only ok for the money. The metal frame has a bit too cheap look, the buttons also look and feel a bit cheap. The position of the power button is bad. It's placed too low down on the right side and it's too easy to accidentally push it while holding the phone with your left hand. The white model looks a lot cheaper than the black (common problem I think, or maybe that's only in my eyes because I don't like white phones?). It feels like it's built like a tank without being too heavy or too thick though. But what is all the space inside used for? I mean there are 30% thinner 5" FHD MTK6752 metal frame phones with same size battery on the market now.

3. It's fast like a good MTK6592 device in benchmarks that measures overall performance, like AnTuTu (30k-32k), but a bit slower in only CPU performance benchmarks like Geekbench 3 (multi-core 2.1k compared with 2.5k). In browser tests like Sunspider 1.0.2 it's significantly faster than MTK6592, ~1050 ms compared with ~1500 ms in Chrome. The stock browser is faster than Chrome, like in all Chinese devices I have tried lately, ~850 ms. As a reference iPhone 6 only need ~330 ms to finish the test. In Epic Citadel I get 48.1 fps in Ultra High Quality mode and 58.8 fps in High Performance mode and I think that's extremely good for a cheap Chinese phone. The Mali T760 GPU is really a lot faster than the 450 MP in MTK6592 devices.

4. The GPS has no problems in my device. It locks in fast and with 15 satellites in view outside and 10 in use I get an accuracy of 1 m.

5. The launcher (Launcher 3) is ok but it can't be configured in any way. The main problems with it is that the icons are much too big for me (too few rows/columns) and if you disable the Google Search bar at the top of the screen (I hate it and always do that), the space can't be used for anything else on the home screens. No widgets or app icons can be moved there. I would change it to Holo Launcher HD if I would use the phone daily and I also did that on my test sample just to try. It takes a while to set up Holo if you never did it on any other device but it's really worth it on this device.

6. The cameras are just ok in daylight but not ok when it gets a bit dark. Typical Chinese device cameras and I don't believe it's a real 13 MP sensor. It's probably interpolated but I don't know how to check that without opening up the phone and try to identify a camera module maker and model. The picture in picture (both cameras at the same time) function is a bit funny. One strange thing I have noticed is that the live view on screen shows some bright red colours very incorrect on screen when taking the photo, but then when watching the saved photo it turns out quite right. I don't know what is causing this. The smile detection doesn't work. Enable it and the camera starts seeing "smiles" everywhere and fire of shots. I haven't tried the other functions yet (HDR, anti-shake, zero shutter delay, …). If someone wants any specific test just ask me.

7. The wifi reception is good but not as good as my best devices. Side by side the Hammer shows 10 dB lower signal strength in WiFi Analyzer than an iFive Mini 3GS tab (but a tab can have much bigger antennas).

8. The 4G data is very fast and has very good reception. I get maximum 60 Mb/s down and 15 Mb/s up (2600 MHz) and that is probably limited by the network capacity where I live (not very close to the station). Side by side at the same time I get 50 Mb/s down and 20 Mb/s up in an iPhone 5S.

9. The sound quality in phone calls is good and the volume is more than enough. Nothing to complain about there.

10. The sound quality from the built in speaker on the backside is crap for music but ok for phone calls. In other words only mid range frequencies goes through and the rest just becomes distortion.

11. The sound quality in high quality earphones is ok. A lot of bass (which is a bit rare in a Ch device) but a bit thin in higher frequencies. Can probably be fixed with an EQ app. The sound volume is more than enough in good earphones (high sensitivity).

12. The screen is excellent for the money. Bright and vivid and with good viewing angles. Personally I think that 1280 x 720 is enough on a 5" screen. A FHD screen don't have any advantages over a HD screen in 5" size at present I think.

13. I have some sound glitches in some games. Can be a firmware problem that can/will be solved in future updates. Otherwise heavy games like Asphalt 7 flows fine.

14. The factory mounted screen protector on my device was crap. It was badly mounted, it gets scratched easily and it makes the touch screen less sensitive. Take off!

15. The black "original flip case" I got with the phones are silver grey, not black. Ugly cover in a beautiful UMI labelled box.

16. The charge cable is thick but made of too stiff plastic outer which makes it very bulky to handle, but the charger is small and handy (same outer as an iPhone charger for EU).

17. I have the so called real 2250 mAh battery in my phones (made in Shenzhen by Jiete …) but it's not more than ~1700 real mAh, but I have only charged it and drained it completely 3 times so far and the capacity is increasing every charge. The second charge I only reached 94% full on the meter but draining the battery until the phone shut down by itself solved that problem. It stayed at 1% for a long time before shutting down. I've seen that on a JiaYu phone before. I guess the charge monitoring in the phone just needs to calibrate itself. I have tried the screen-on-time in Geekbench 3 first time today and I get 4h 10m out of a full charge now. During the test the phone was in full normal (for me) standby with wifi, gps and all radios on (no disabled frequencies), except BT and HotKnot. The discharge graph is an absolutely straight line from 100 to 1 %. Excellent! But then it stays a long time on 1% before shutting down. In fact it stays as long on 1% -> 0% as on 10% -> 1%. I hope it will calibrate itself after a few more battery cycles. I had my usual ~150 apps installed during the tests and a many (most) of them wants to apply some startup permissions and some wants to run energy draining processes in the background even if you didn't ask for it. I'm not using any battery saver app (they are all crap in my opinion) but it's a rooted phone so then Greenify works fine to freeze out the worst apps (FB, FB Messenger, Skype, Amazon Kindle, etc). Greenify was on in the tests. The screen intensity was set to 50%. The Geekbench battery test can be seen in this link: http://browser.primatelabs.com/battery3/66702

18. It charges very slow (5h 0% -> 100%) and that is not limited by the original UMI 1A charger because I have tried with a 2A tab charger and get the same result.

19. I might add something to this post later when I have something worth sharing.

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EDIT:

20. I have made a real life test, normal use (for me), of the battery capacity of my test phone. The capacity of the battery is not what the specs say (in mAh) but for normal use it actually has more than enough capacity, provided that you charge it every night. Small battery but the MTK6732 SoC really needs less energy than previous MTK SoCs. I got 19h use out of it including 3h app installs and web browsing, 45m full screen (landscape) YouTube HD video playing and 25m phone calls. Total screen on time 3h 50m. The screen intensity was set to 30% on the slider (=~50% real). I had lousy reception for both phone and wifi during the test and it's interesting to see that the phone radios took 64% of the battery capacity, the wifi only took 5% and the screen took 19% (according to GSam Battery Monitor). The phone radios seems to be relatively heavy in power consumption in this phone and I don't think that can be explained only with my bad reception during the test. I think tha's a MTK6732 problem and that means that this phone (and other MTK6732 devices) could be tweaked to consume a lot less energy (shutting down unsused radios and frequencies completely for example), but that can't be done entirely with any simple settings or apps so it's not for "normal" users maybe. I won't try that on this device but I have a MTK6752 device to test also and I guess it will be the same for that SoC. I will concentrate on that device instead.

21. I saw that someone had some issues with the automatic screen brightness earlier in this thread. It works very fine in my device.