[Android General] mdabar:
[REVIEW] uleFone Be Touch: 5,5" IPS, 4G, 64bits octa-core CPU, 3GB RAM, fingerprint

uleFone is one of new Chinese brands making good things lately. And in the same way some players are doing, they also wanted to present something interesting before the summer period.

But they want to be like "the others", so they have come with an amazing smartphone which they have presented as their flagship device for the season: the uleFone Be Touch

Something very interesting, since this brand is very young. They’ve worked designing and making parts for other brands during years, but it wasn’t until 2014 they moved to manufacture their own smartphones.

When I opened the box my first though was about that size "It's huge!". But then, I started it and as Megan Trainor sings... "It's all about that bass"

Only that smartphone is not fat at all, it's very thin and light. It's even thinner than other thin devices like the Siswoo Cooper i7 I reviewed some weeks ago.

But let's go step by step.

Design and package

The box is quite standard, white, same shape that we can typically find for the iPhones or Samsung devices, for example. With a sticker showing some info and then most of the specifications on the bottom part.

Once opened, we can see the amazing Be Touch with its huge screen inside a soft bag and on the lower level, we have all the rest which is USB cable, charger (attention 1.5A! more than common units), headphones and quick start guide in English and other European languages... it's not something very necessary (we all know how to start the phone and take a picture) but it's really the first time I see it. And not one single item in Chinese. Sincerely that feels like more quality.

I live you that video with those impressions and something more:

[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/A_3dzsaclFk[/YOUTUBE]

Summarizing, on the front we have the 5,5" screen. On the top, frontal camera for selfies...with flash!!, light and proximity sensor. And on the bottom we have the navigation buttons: menu, back and home... which integrates a great surprise in form of fingerprint reader. Of all that I will talk more in detail.

On the left side we will find the lock/power and the volume buttons.

Going to the bottom side, just the micro and speaker (very iPhone-like). We have the holes for micro USB and jack exit on the top side, and nothing at all on the right side.

If we flip the phone, on the rear part we will see the main camera (using the Sony IMX214 4th gen sensor) with dual led flash and on the middle the uleFone logo.

All that within very tight dimensions of 158.1x77.4x8.6mm and another advantage is that it fits very well on the hand. It’s true that it’s big, but it doesn’t slip.

Hardware specifications

When you put the mark "flagship" over a product, you really want to mean that device is your top-range. Especially when you are a new player on the field and you want to set up what is your quality level and left aside your “Chinese stamp mark”. The Be Touch is much more than 64 bit octa-core processor and 3GB of RAM…So here it is what hides inside this thin beast.

[IMG="ulefone Be Touch - by mdabar"]http://ulefone.com/images/betouch/betouch_01.jpg[/IMG]

Model uleFone Be Touch

Color Metal Grey / Silk White

Dimensions 158.1 x 77.4 x 8.60

Weight 160g

Operating system Pre-install Android 5.0 Lollipop

Touch ID Front Fingerprint Scanner, Unlock in 0.1-0.5s

CPU 64Bit MTK MT6752 processor Octa core 1.7GHz CPU

GPU Mali T760 MP2/7000MHz GPU

RAM 3GB LPDDR3 RAM

ROM 16G

Battery 2550mAH

Charger Quick charger 1.5A ooutput

Display 5.5 inches, HD 1280*720pixels, IPS OGS (NEW 2.5D Arc screen) with Corning® Gorilla® Glass 3

Cameras 13MP 4th generation camera Sony IMX214 (main) and 5.0MP (OV5648) for the Front camera

Video 1080P, 2K, 4K

Network GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 (band5,band8,band3,band2) ; WCDMA: 850/900/1900/2100 (band5,band8,band2,band1) ; FDD-LTE: 800/1800/2100/2600(band20,band3,band1,band7)

SIM Dual sim dual standby, Micro SIM and Standard SIM

WiFi WiFi802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Support dual-band Wi-Fi(2.4GHz/5GHz)

Bluetooth Bluetooth 4.0

Positioning GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, Digital Compass

Hall Effect Sensor, Gravity Sensor,

Ambient Light Sensor,

Touch Sensor, Digital Compass

Regarding the connectivity, needless to say it fully covers all our needs. The WiFi connects and transfers very fast, probably the improvements from Lollipop help, because I haven’t had any troubles of losing signal (as it happened with other devices). I have tried the BT with headphones (Digicare DO) and also with a BT keyboard, working both very well, quick pairing.

The SIM (standard and micro sizes) are located just next to the microSD slot, so sincerely a little bit hard to introduce the card, but once done, the networks are fast detected and connected, so I could use 3G/4G and also make calls very successfully. The voice is very clear and with enough volume.

Display

This is one of the most attracting points of this device. Its 5,5” IPS OGS screen with Corning Gorilla Glass of 3rd generation offers a resolution of 1280x720ppp. I can say that up to the date it’s the best display I’ve seen on a not first brand phone. The quality of the colors and the bright is amazing.

It comes with the dynamic control (adaptive brightness), so it automatically adapts to the lighting conditions to increase or reduce the bright level, making perfectly viewable even under sunshine.

Following the last trends, it also have the “Off-Screen Gesture” function, each time more common and sincerely very useful, since we can program several applications or functions to start without having to unlock the phone: camera, radio, calendar,.. any of the installed apps can be started by drawing a pattern on the locked screen.

Camera

We arrive to one of the most critical points of each review, since normally the manufacturers include camera sensors with a high number of megapixels but not offering the expected quality. uleFone advised they wanted to make the difference and present a great device, so they equipped the Be Touch with a main camera of 13Mpx with a Sony IMX214 4th generation sensor. Apparently this should be a warranty, but we’ve seen many other phones with good lenses giving poor results.

Fortunately this is not (so much) the case with the Be Touch. Until now this is the best (Chinese) one on the quality of pictures and videos. There is still the point to improve when there are poor light conditions. But I repeat the quality even though is much better than with other smartphones.

Here below some examples:

[IMG="uleFone picture sample 1 by dabarsm"]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-u7-wx5V4IF0/VWCRYBSyw7I/AAAAAAAANZc/3oa4PKPaw6A/w696-h522-no/IMG_20150520_180808.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG="uleFone picture sample 2 by dabarsm"]https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-9X3yaAce9Ag/VWCRYFiPleI/AAAAAAAANZo/LWAMpY6yN8E/w392-h522-no/IMG_20150520_181909.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG="uleFone picture sample by dabarsm"]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-at7NFfN_NTc/VWCRYPGS8aI/AAAAAAAANZs/PCMFJghXY-8/w392-h522-no/IMG_20150520_181928.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG="uleFone picture sample by dabarsm"]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-v4FegFVKW9Q/VWCRZDHMmZI/AAAAAAAANZw/Wg0lDjPkJp4/w392-h522-no/IMG_20150520_184802.jpg[/IMG]

Another surprise comes with the front camera, the chosen sensor is OV5648 from Omni Vision, a high-performance, low-cost 5-megapixel CameraChip sensor for smartphones and tablets, which uses the latest 1.4-µm OmniBSI+ pixel architecture. But what surprised me was to find a led flash next to this camera. No questions about the selfies fever we’re immersed on, so the flash is doubtless a way to increase the quality of our portraits.

Regarding the videos, you can see this FullHD sample recorded outdoors, and even using zoom the quality is really good.

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk4R_2KQ_NA[/YOUTUBE]

Software

This model comes directly with Android 5.0 Lollipop, so very good news since we have the almost last version of Android since the beginning, with all the improvements already mentioned on different articles like the better battery consumption, more secure environment since first boot, RAM management, WiFi connectivity issues solved, OK Google,…

By the other hand, need to say, that no Chinese stuff (apps) were installed on the phone, very clear Android [Símbolo] Only an icon called “ulefone” which brings us to the manufacturer website.

Another of the key points on the Be Touch is the fingerprint scanner, integrated on the “Home” button. It works really fast (some people say it’s even faster than the TouchID on the iPhone 6), and the way it register new fingers is different from other sensors where we had to slide our fingers. On this case we just have to put the desired finger repeatedly on the sensor until we have the full print marked on red on the screen. Meaning it has been fully recorded.

My suggestion is to place the finger on different positions, so it catches it from different angles and completes the task faster. We can register up to 5 fingers, which is a significant improvement against other devices allowing only 3 prints.

Due to the size of its screen and its powerful hardware, the Be Touch is perfect for entertainment. I installed Kodi (formerly known as XBMC), so I can play FullHD movies and TV shows directly from my NAS over the LAN, without any lags, smoothly and with very high quality of image and sound.

Normally I just try some games like Asphalt or Fifa (no need to say they go like lightning), however, bearing in mind the fingerprint sensor I decided to install my company’s software and use it as mobile office.

Yes, the BYOD is a real trend all around us ;) I installed MaaS360, and configured mail, agenda and other tools. Once again it’s not only the speed of everything I try, jumping quickly from one task to another, but also the size of the screen makes this device very comfortable to read emails, see (and edit) Office documents, use CRM tools… really comfortable, especially when I compared to y iPhone 5’s tiny screen.

Autonomy

As stated above on the specifications table, the Be Touch is equipped with a removable battery of 2.550mAh, more than enough for a full day with average use: calls, wifi browsing, emails, whatsapp, pictures, social networking, Office documents editing… and all that thinking that the use of corporate tools and apps consume more battery.

Conclusions

A couple of months ago I saw the announcement of the Xiaomi MiNote and I really liked it. I though it was a real alternative to first brands smartphones with quality enough and a restrained price. I sincerely didn’t know so much about uleFone yet, and others brand had showed important improvements but still not at a comparable level to first brands.

I’m not meaning that the Be Touch has the same quality of the last Samsung Galaxy S6, but honestly it’s getting close. uleFone should still improve the management of taking pictures with dark conditions and polish some other minor details.

When I opened the box, I presumed that phone was very powerful but maybe too big for a daily use and still had to test the camera results, I take pictures every day. After using it, I can say that it’s a very comfortable device, not heavy at all (just 160gr) and since it’s very thin, it fits very well on the pocket.

I completely recommend it if you are looking for a new smartphone with a lot of possibilities and for a moderated price, around 205€ with Etotalk.com

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