Ulefone Be Pro Text + Video Review: $146USD/5.5"/LTE OnePlus One Clone/Alternative

[zijin_cheng]

Introduction
I was very excited about the new wave of MTK6732 phones being released after hearing that these processors used 30% less battery than the MTK6592 while being faster. While I have high hopes for battery life of MTK6732 phones in general, the small battery size of this specific phone combined with the large screen makes me apprehensive with regards to the battery life. I sincerely hope the LTE enabled Ulefone Be Pro will live up to my lofty battery expectations. Regarding the design of the Ulefone, it has clearly lifted its design straight from OnePlus' playbook, and hopefully they have copied the OnePlus One's quality as well. It has great specifications and retails for $170 at Gearbest. The full specifications are below:

Key Specifications:
5.5 inch screen, 1280x720 pixel display

GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz
WCDMA 850/900/1900/2100MHz
FDD-LTE 800/1800/2100/2600MHz

MTK6732, 64 Bit Quad Core, 1.5GHz
13MP back camera + 8MP front camera
2GB RAM + 16GB ROM
Bluetooth, NFC, GPS (A-GPS, GLONASS)
Dual SIM Standby (nanoSIM, MicroSIM)
MicroSD Card Slot
Android 4.4.4
Dimensions: 157 x 77.8 x 8.8mm
Battery Size: 2600mAh
Weight: 166g



Unboxing the Ulefone Be Pro
The Ulefone Be Pro came from GearBest in a plain brown box. It contained the white Ulefone box as well as some protective bubble wrapping. It had the usual contents, earphones, a microUSB cable and a charger.
Note: Instead of giving me a North American charger, they gave me a European charger instead.


Hardware
The Ulefone Be Pro is almost the exact same size as the OnePlus One, at 157 x 77.8 x 8.8mm. It is as light as the OnePlus One as well, at 167g. In hand, it definitely does feel like a OnePlus One.



The silver bezel around the entire phone looks quite nice. The front of the phone holds the front facing camera as well as 3 capacitive buttons that do not light up. It has respectably sized bezels around the screen.


The volume buttons are located on the left side of the phone while the power button is located on the right side of the phone. Both the volume and power buttons are of lower quality than in used to, and they feel less firm when pressed.

The back of the phone is removeable, but requires fingernails, patience, and bravery, as it feels like you're breaking the cover when you attempt opening it.


It reveals a removeable 2600mAh battery, a regular SIM card slot, a MicroSD card slot as well as a MicroSD slot.


The removeable back is also interchangeable, available in black, white, and sandstone. It is textured with rubbery plastic, providing a good grip while feeling good in hand. However, it does attract and shoe fingerprints quite easily.


While the back of the phone feels good in hand, it does not feel as premium as phones constructed out of aluminum or glass. The speaker grille is also located on the back near the bottom of the phone. The camera and LED flash are located in the middle along the centreline of the phone. However, the camera sticks out from the back of the phone so you have to be careful when placing the phone down. The Ulefone Logo is also present, and isn't too flashy.


I personally have very small hands, and did not expect a 5.5" phone to be this big, even after playing around with the OnePlus One. It all comes down to personal preference, whether you like a larger display or not. Objectively however, the Ulefone Be Pro's build quality and feel in hand is good, but lacks the premium feel of other smartphones like the HTC One M8 and the iPhone 6.


Display
Although the Be Pro features a 1280x720 resolution on the 5.5" display, i barely noticed. The screen gets quite bright, colors are accurate, and the lower pixel density doesn't affect the experience at all. Some might immediately complain that the pixel density isn't high enough, but for those of you who are firm in your need for a 1080p display, you can safely turn away from this phone. However, if you do not mind a 720p display, then read on. Its IPS panel with OGS (One Glass Solution) technology is obtained from LG and is satisfactorily bright. Having just moved from the Cubot X9 which had a brilliantly bright (and colourful) panel that was very close in quality to the iPhone 6's display, the Ulefone's screen is merely satisfactory in that regard. Colours are accurate and the screen is bright enough to use under direct sunlight.



In my opinion, the lower resolution allows the MTK6732 to work easier and saves battery life, which is more important than cramming pixels into a 5.5" screen.


Speaker Quality
I have been surprised with chinese smartphone speakers as of late. There aren't many speakers that can match up to the fidelity of the HTC One M8, but chinese manufacturers seem to have hit all the important points in speaker manufacture for the average consumer. They have made the speaker volume very loud without distortion, ensured that audio quality was good for listening to music, and provided natural voice tones for audio such as calls, podcasts, and audiobooks. I listened to podcasts using the Ulefone's speakerphone while travelling at 110km/h (63mph??) and my car is definitely not well sealed, making the inside very noisy. The Ulefone Be Pro is no exception. You will be satisfied with the quality and volume of these speakers. Its speaker grilles are located on the backside of the phone.

One thing I didn't like was how poorly made the headphone jack was. When trying to use it with my AUX cable in my car, it crackled and never got properly connected so I gave up and just used the speakerphone for podcasts. My AUX cable isn't the greatest either, as my THL 5000 will disconnect if you even touch the AUX cable or swerve too hard. However, there is absolutely no problem when using headphones instead.


Battery
I didn't know what to think when it came to the Ulefone Be Pro. On one hand, it had the brand spanking new MTK6732 that is supposedly 30% more power efficient than the MTK6592. On the other hand, they paired a decidedly subpar battery capacity (2600mAh) with a large 5.5" display. Would battery life be good? Bad? Or just average due to those two components averaging each other out? I performed the tests and found out. I will be comparing this phone's battery life to others such as the Galaxy S5 and Xperia Z3. GSMArena does 3 key battery tests on its phones, namely calling, web browsing and video. As I do not have the resources to do all three tests, I only performed the web browsing test and the video test (who am I going to talk to for 47 hours anyway?).

I set the screen brightness to 250 nits and installed Web Reloader from the Google Play Store and used it to reload webpages over WiFi every few seconds. First, I reloaded the mobile version of the CNN home page every 10 seconds Then I transitioned to www.focalprice.com and reloaded that every 30 seconds. Finally, I used www.gearbest.com and reloaded this page every 30 seconds for the rest of the time. The phone finally died after 5:36 of browsing. The http://blog.gsmarena.com/sony-OnePlus One-z3-battery-life/ manages 9:46 of browsing time with just a 3100mAh battery.


In the video playback test, the screen brightness was 250nits and a standard definition video played. GSMArena also set this test up similarly, except they turned on airplane mode, I chose not to do this in order to better replicate real life, as videos are not usually watched while in airplane mode (unless in an actual airplane). The phone played back video for 8 hours and 30 minutes.

On a more "normal" battery test, the phone was off the charger for a total of 18 hours. During that time, WiFi, data, and GPS (High Accuracy) was always on. Double tap to wake was always activated as well. I unplugged my phone at 5:50am and plugged it back in around 1pm . I racked up a total of 3 hours of screen on time, which consisted of 1 hour of google maps navigation, about 1/2 hour of Clash of Clans/Boom Beach and Feedly, which drained my battery from 100% to 70%. I also installed and ran a Speedtest on 4G. as well as installing Real Racing 3 on WiFi which was a 500MB download.

I did a standby battery test with WiFi connected, data on, GPS on, as well as double tap to wake enabled. The battery drained about 1% per hour on standby.

Charging the phone from 0% to 100% took about 2 hours.

The MTK6732 processor seems to be a lot more power efficient than the MTK6592, using up less of the phone's battery. The battery will get you throughout moderate to heavy use for a day, but do not expect two day battery life.


Software and Performance
The Ulefone Be Pro runs a 100% stock version of Android 4.4.4.


Ulefone has already provided a video (On February 14) showing Android 5.0 Lollipop running on the Ulefone Be Pro, so you are pretty much guaranteed an OTA update to Lollipop. We can look forward to Lollipop's "Project Volta" which will increase the phone's standby time, supposedly giving a Nexus 5 an extra 90 minutes of power. We'll see how it improves this phone's battery life.

So lets talk about the Be Pro's 4.4.4 version of software. Have I mentioned that I have not used a chinese phone that is as smooth as a Nexus device, OnePlus One or an HTC One M8? Well, now there is. Smooth to the touch, a sensitive and properly calibrated touch screen, this phone just responds when you put your finger on it. Launching apps is instant, on par with the OnePlus One. Another issue I've had with my other chinese phones is that swyping using Google Keyboard and Swype had a "laggy" gesture trail, which other devices including the Moto G had perfectly responsive gesture trails. The Ulefone has fixed this as well.

It includes a version of Samsung's Air Gesture that uses the proximity sensor, that is surprisingly useful when you have dirty hands and are trying to cook and read recipes at the same time.

Smart Gestures seem to be a staple in all chinese phones nowadays. For those who don't know what smart gestures are, it allows the user to draw certain gestures on the screen while it is off to launch certain applications, for example drawing an "M" on the screen would launch music. It also allows the user to wake the device by double tapping on the screen or swiping up on the screen. These smart gestures use up more battery life as it prevents the phone from entering deep sleep, so it is a trade off on features vs battery life.

It also includes very basic notification control in the settings, you can change the notification light to 5 different colours and edit the settings for basic notifications like calls, SMS, calendar, etc.

It has multiple languages as well, check out the video (Timestamp 7:32) at the top of the review to see if your language is supported.

Ulefone partitioned the internal storage well. Unlike other phones that partition 4GB or so for the phone and partition the rest as the "SD-Card", they partitioned all the 16GB so all of it is useable.

With a Mali T-760 graphics chip, this phone pulled off gaming without a hitch. Coupled with 2GB of RAM and a 720p resolution, intense games such as Real Racing ran buttery smooth. Other popular games like Clash of Clans also ran perfectly well.


I ran Antutu as well, and obtained a score of 31894, while the video review showed a score of 30920, which is lower than expected due to running Antutu 3 times in a row, heating up the phone resulting in thermal throttling.



Connectivity
This phone supports quad band GSM as well as quad band WCDMA. It also supports certain FDD-LTE bands, bands 1/3/7/20 to be exact. Interestingly, it gets better 3G reception than my Nexus 4, THL 5000, and Cubot X9. In areas in my basement where I don't get any reception with those two phones, I get a weak 1 bar signal with the Ulefone.

Check out this link to see if the carrier in your country supports the LTE bands:
http://www.worldtimezone.com/gsm.html
Never mind. My phone switched to 4G after waiting about 1 minute. I performed multiple speedtests in different areas of Toronto, Canada, and obtained speeds anywhere from 36Mbps to 25Mbps, which is not bad at all (also using almost 200MB out of my 1GB).


WiFi performance is also good, as I get reception anywhere in the house. My Wireless N router is in the basement, and I get reception anywhere in the house, even on the second floor and outside.

The GPS locked on almost instantly, and never once lost signal. I used it to navigate to work for about 1 hour and it always stayed on course and never deviated even once.

Bluetooth and NFC are also included in this phone, and both work as expected.

Side Note: This will not work on Wind Mobile in Canada


Camera
Ulefone was involved in a controversy with this very phone, where they had claimed the back camera contained a Sony sensor when in fact it did not. They provided a letter of apology (which is quite surprising) but not much more. The camera is very responsive, with very minimal lag between movement of the phone and what the screen displays.

While the camera doesn't contain Sony hardware as advertised, the camera quality still is quite good for Chinese phones.





It captures colors very well and fidelity isn't bad either. I'm quite satisfied with the daylight performance of the camera, but what I'm really impressed with is the lowlight performance of the camera. While it still is a far cry from the likes of the HTC One M8 with its Ultrapixel camera, it is leaps and bounds ahead of other Chinese phones in its price range or even those above $200USD.


Verdict
So what is the verdict on this $169 OnePlus clone? Good specifications, good build quality, and a better than average battery might compel some to purchase this. However, the 720p screen might stop some. Personally, the moment I started using the phone I immediately started considering using this as my daily driver.

Pros
Cheap(ish)
Good build quality
Good specs
Good battery life in video playback
Good cell and data reception
Well optimized firmware, very fluid experience
Pretty good camera performance in ideal settings

Cons
Average battery life in WiFi
Average low light camera performance (but a lot better than many chinese phones)
720p (for some people)

An MTK6732 5.5" phone for $146? Can't complain. Good build quality, good battery, fast processor, and a smooth software experience make it worth the ticket price. On the other hand, a 720p screen might be a deal breaker. In conclusion, I highly recommend this phone, it is a great phone for the price.