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

I received an UMI Rome today and made a lot of tests of it and I must say that even for $110 I’m rather disappointed. Here are some of my early findings.

Build quality

The build quality is ok for the price. The phone feels rather solid and weighs 183 grams with screen protector on. But it’s thick and it also feels rather thick and clumsy in the hand. The specs from UMI say 7.9 mm which is a lie even if I measure beside the protruding camera. Beside the camera it’s 9 mm thick and over the camera it’s 10.4 mm. Too thick in my opinion. Also the buttons on the side rattles a bit and feels a bit ”cheap”.

Display

It’s no AMOLED display as far as I can see. On the contrary it seems to be a rather mediocre LCD HD 1280x720 display with not so good viewing angles and a lot of light leakage at the top of the display. If it’s really an AMOLED I wonder how it can have that much light leakage at the top? It’s also no real 2.5D display. The glass has slightly rounded edges but that doesn’t make it 2.5D when there is so much borders on the sides of the display. It just looks 2.5D when the screen is off. The aspect ratio between actual screen and the rest of the front is very good though. The worst downside of the screen is perhaps that it only has a 2-point digitizer. It’s many years since even the cheapest smart phones on the market started to have 5-point touch displays. Really bad. Also the screen has very bad touch sensitivity but probably it gets a bit better if I remove the screen protector.

Radio reception

All radios are suffering from very bad reception. I wonder how they managed to build such a large phone with so bad antennas? The wifi signal is generally 20 dB lower in WiFi Analyzer in the Rome than in my cheap MT6735 reference phone. Also the 4G download speed is low. In Ookla Speedtest I get below 30 Mb/s download speed and below 8 Mb/s upload speed on the same spot as I get 100/40 Mb/s in the MT6735 reference device. The max speed in my 4G network is 100/100 Mb/s on LTE B20. I think the modem in MT6753 is capable of 150 Mb/s download speed and therefor I draw the conclusion that the reception in the Rome is very bad due to bad antennas. Also the GPS reception is very bad. There is no way that I can get a fix inside whereas the MT6735 reference gets a fix in only a few seconds. Even outside it takes a long time to first fix. Seems like antenna problems again. I almost wonder if there’s some production error in my Rome, if all the antennas are wrongly or badly connected somehow? I haven’t tried the BT yet but I suspect that it suffers from the same problem.

Performance

In AnTuTu V6 I get a score of 37,500 which is ok I think. The Mali-T720 GPU in the MT6753 is relatively fast and therefor even most 3D games runs ok. Especially since the GPU only has to drive a HD display. In Geekbench 3 the multi-core score is also ok at 2,900. However, it’s the single-core score that really counts in my opinion and that score is quite low at 620. The low single-core score is reflected in the Sunspider 1.0.2 java test. The Rome needs almost 1200 ms to finish that test with the stock browser. It’s not fair to compare with my $800 iPhone 6S but the 6S finishes the same test almost 6 times faster. One good thing I’ve noticed with all MT6753 devices is that they don’t overheat like the miserable MT6752 SoC does in all devices that I have tested. 5 minutes of HD video in YouTube over WiFi only brings the highest monitored temp in CPU-Z to less than 45°C, whereas the MT6752 easily reaches 70°C.

Cameras

The main camera is quite good but only 8 MP (IMX164 confirmed) interpolated to 13. The photos looks natural in colour and whitebalance, unlike the photos from UMI Hammer 5" for example. Setting the camera resolution to the true resolution, 8 MP in this case, seems to make the photos sharper and better. Maybe because the interpolation mess up the photos. The front camera is a rather bad GC2355 fixed focus 2 MP camera. Maybe good enough for video calls but definitely not good enough for the users who wants to take selfies.

Root

This is the greatest strength of this and other UMI phones. The phone comes pre-rooted with just a flick of a switch. Also SuperSU is already there as soon as you activate developer options and unlock the bootloader. Many thanks to UMI for the initiative to sell the phones pre-rooted (maybe depending on which version of Rome it is for different markets?). Also the Rootjoy PC software deserves a lot of cred even though there’s no other firmware available for the Rome yet (and might never be?).

Software

The phone comes totally free from bloatware. No Chinese crapware and not much gapps crap. Again UMI should have a lot of cred for that I think. All there is is just a standard Android 5.1 + SuperSU.

I add a few screen dumps below from some of the tests I made. If I make any new observations worth sharing I will add them in edits below the original post.