With the onslaught of Chinese smartphone makers, homegrown companies are surely facing the heat. In what is increasingly becoming a business model, many companies are selling smartphones online-only. Micromax’s online-only smartphone arm called YU Televentures has already released the Cyanogen OS sporting YU Yureka in the past, and on May 12, it released another device called the YU Yuphoria .
While many had expected a high end device, YU instead released Yuphoria, a budget device with a metallic frame. The design of the YU Yuphoria is impressive, considering it has employed a metallic frame. The rear cover is made of plastic and is removable. On the top you have a 3.5mm audio jack and at the base there’s the microUSB charging/data transfer port. On the right hand side there are the volume rocker buttons with the power/ standby button lodged between the volume rocker. The YU Yuphoria houses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 system on chip which has a 64-bit 1.2GHz quad-core processor with Adreno 306 GPU, along with 2GB of RAM. The Yuphoria also comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop with the Cyanogen OS 12 ROM. The phone retains the Android 5.0 design element.
There are some special apps on the phone such as AudioFX which lets you customise the audio output, ScreenCast lets you record your on screen navigations with the recording registering where you’ve touched the screen as well and so on. Call quality is good, but the earpiece speaker does tend to distort sound at maximum volumes. In terms of heating issues, the phone does tend to get warm when running benchmarks or during gaming. I noticed that the display portion and rear side did tend to heat up when I was out in the sun, with the metal frame getting particularly warm. Another issue was the default keyboard app, which even though it supports swype-like functionality tends to miss out of a lot of alphabets, leading to spelling errors. The YU Yuphoria has a 5-inch HD display and it comes with a laminated glass coating, thereby giving it a pixel density of 294ppi. The IPS panel ensures that you have good viewing angles. Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection is also included which keeps the display protected from scratch marks and smudges. The auto brightness mode tends to jump abruptly between brightness levels when you are using the phone in tricky lighting situations. Sunlight legibility is good as long as you boost up the brightness levels as keeping it in the auto mode was a bit annoying. The phone’s display is sharp and holding at an arms length. There is an 8MP rear camera with an OmniVision OV8865 sensor with an aperture of f/2.2 on the YU Yuphoria. It comes with auto-focus whereas the front-facing 5MP camera has a fixed focus. The phone houses a 2230mAh battery and this is good enough for an 8-hour work day on regular use. But if you are a power user, you will need to carry around your charger with you. One thing that is impressive is the quick charging time and you can even replace the battery. YU Yuphoria offers an impressive package at Rs 6, 999 and at this price point, the Yuphoria’s design does manage to stand out from competition. Features such as a metallic frame, 2GB RAM, 16GB storage, 4G, dual SIM, Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection, Cyanogen OS, 8MP camera do give a good value proposition.
