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The Ulefone Metal also shipped with some complimentary accessories, which is nice. Poor quality glass, an unintuitive UI, and questionable software decisions come together to make for a very poor photography experience. Yes, the logos fit well with the majority of the UI and certainly fit better than the old Gingerbread-style stock Gallery app that Google has abandonedbut there are other options that also would fit, and without being copyright infringement at that.
Android Smartphones
The two audio tracks are identical, provide no real benefit, and only serve to increase file size, but there are two of them. This is helped further by the fairly lean OS that the phone runs by default. 6 inch android phones questions The only way to get rid of it is to disable permission management which Ulefone makes nice and easy to do for some reasonand even then it comes back every once in awhile like when you reboot. Some of the bugs are just strange. The Ulefone Metal looks and feels like a nice phone, but its rough edges and the tough competition at that price point prevent me from recommending it.
Android Smartphones
Something in the 50s is outright hot to the touch. Moto G6 will reportedly have a 5. In this test, most of the phones lit up most of the hill, with the HTC 10 even lighting up the whole thing including the small trees on top.
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The HDR images are a bit more interesting in some ways. For reference, here is what the histogram for the same picture taken with an HTC 10 looks like. Video defaults to an H. Seeing these results, we reached out to Ulefone again, and they confirmed that there was no secret sauce here. Setting up the cellular data connection for the first time is a bit of a pain. While 16GB with an SD card is enough to get by on although I tend to prefer 32GB and higherand while the performance is definitely on the slower side, it is acceptable for the price. Yes, the logos fit well with the majority of the UI and certainly fit better than the old Gingerbread-style stock Gallery app that Google has abandonedbut there are other options that also would fit, and without being copyright infringement at that.
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22.03.2018 - December 20, Steven Zimmerman. The eight A53 cores running at 1. While phone SoCs have come a long way, there is still a substantial performance gap between a flagship SoC like the Snapdragon or Exynosand an entry level chip like the MediaTek MT The UI just feels like a mishmash of different styles. The build feels solid, the spec sheet ticks almost all of the boxes for the price point, and Ulefone seems to be putting a legitimate effort into their developer relations. The Ulefone Metal looks and feels like a nice phone, but its rough edges and the tough competition at that price point prevent me from recommending it. You just make the bounding box be a square from the top of the row to the bottom of the row and the same widthinstead of just barely covering the target object itself.
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17.03.2018 - Video defaults to an H. If the WCDMA band 5 support is truly too poorly optimized to even be announced, then it likely should have been disabled through software until a point in time at which it is ready for use as, if the claim is true, leaving it enabled could potentially cause a host of other issues. The experience is designed with the intent of competing with Qualcomm Snapdragon 4xx and 61x series chips, and it shows. Unfortunately, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is causing the issue. Oddly enough, my device came with two screen protectors pre-applied, the usual shipping one with information about the phone on it, and a second one beneath that which felt like a standard plastic screen protector.
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Setting up the cellular data connection for the first time is a bit of a pain. The phone defaults to data being turned off which is a good idea to some extent, but after inserting a SIM card it asks you if you wish to enable data for that SIM card.
The scroll friction on the Ulefone Metal seems to have been set very high. In the settings menu, anything other than a heavy swipe will only travel a short distance. Signal strength appears to be fairly weak.
The phone supports Band 7 LTE for which there are multiple towers near my house, but I had to walk almost right next to the tower before I could get connection.
If the WCDMA band 5 support is truly too poorly optimized to even be announced, then it likely should have been disabled through software until a point in time at which it is ready for use as, if the claim is true, leaving it enabled could potentially cause a host of other issues.
Unfortunately, we could not find any, so we reached out to Ulefone again to see if they could direct us to the filing information which they are required to keep on hand for CE. Upon learning that the Ulefone Metal is likely unlicensed to use WCDMA band 5, I switched the phone into airplane mode, and have not re-enabled the cellular radio since.
The camera hardware is interesting in some ways. That being said, there is a lot more to sensor quality than just the size and resolution. While there is some interesting discussion to be had about alternate ways of interpreting image data from Bayer filter sensors, the differences between pixels and sensels, and super-resolution photography, Ulefone does not appear to have leveraged any of them.
In the images below are resized crops of 13 MP and 8 MP photos taken consecutively, and most of them either appear to be either so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable, or are even slightly in favour of the 8 MP version.
Seeing these results, we reached out to Ulefone again, and they confirmed that there was no secret sauce here. Interesting hardware choices and questionable scaling decisions aside, there still remains the question of whether the Ulefone Metal has a good camera, and the answer is no.
In the non-HDR images, it somehow manages to almost completely blow out the sky, while simultaneously underexposing the rest of the image. The HDR images for the Ulefone are a bit better, reducing the amount of clipping and brightening up some of the dark areas, but it also crushed the blacks a bit for reasons unknown.
For reference, here is what the histogram for the same picture taken with an HTC 10 looks like. The very leftmost and rightmost bars in each image represent the amount of clipping.
Unfortunately this trend was not limited to the first picture set. The worst part of the camera appears to be the lens, and that really shines through in pictures that require substantial dynamic range to be captured properly.
The night shots with streetlights in them came out as such a blurry mess that I started to doubt whether I had actually cleaned the lens properly. So, I gave the lens an extra thorough wipedown and went out to test it a second time, and got the same results.
The images from the Moto E are particularly telling in this instance. It really leaves us wondering how the Ulefone Metal could have performed with better glass.
The HDR images are a bit more interesting in some ways. The Ulefone Metal definitely sees some improvements in foreground brightness, but the red tint only gets worse, and the limitations of the poor quality glass show through just as strongly.
Last, and certainly least for photography on the Ulefone Metal, is the flash. The flash is extremely weak, to the point where I almost cannot imagine a situation in which it would be useful. In the flash test below, I took pictures of a tiny hill in relative darkness with a couple different phones.
In this test, most of the phones lit up most of the hill, with the HTC 10 even lighting up the whole thing including the small trees on top. In fact, it barely was able to light up my own feet when I pointed it directly downward.
It was so bad that the HTC 10 without flash performed about as well as the Metal with flash. Now, admittedly, I rarely use flash when taking photos, instead trying to find better lighting and finding ways to use longer exposures whenever possible, but sometimes you simply cannot avoid it.
The closest I found was a manual ISO setting hidden away in a menu. Video defaults to an H. The camera has a slow motion video mode, which are all the rage right now.
The camera is one of the worst smartphone cameras I have used to date, and I have a feeling the image sensor is not to blame. Poor quality glass, an unintuitive UI, and questionable software decisions come together to make for a very poor photography experience.
The front facing camera is atrocious. The display gets surprisingly bright for an entry level phone, outshining my Moto E, and the white point calibration feels pretty decent if a bit blue at times.
Most noticeably, colour shift starts appearing fairly heavily at even a 45 degree angle, and there is some backlight bleed although it is fairly uniform on our test device. It pains me to say this, as battery life is one of the features that I care the most about, but the Ulefone Metal has fairly bad battery life.
Even a light benchmark like PCMark killed it in 4 hours on minimum brightness on certain runs on a freshly wiped device. For comparison, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 with its 5. Unfortunately, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is causing the issue.
Even in airplane mode on minimum brightness where the WiFi power usage should have no effect, the phone could only eke out 7 hours and 20 minutes of PCMark. The Ulefone Metal is louder, but the S2 still has much clearer audio.
The HTC Legend a midrange phone from almost 7 years ago was louder than the Ulefone Metal by a significant margin, thanks in part to its front-facing speaker, but it was really tinny and had almost no bass and I have reason to suspect that the speaker on my HTC Legend might be damaged….
Just being back-mounted alone is a bit of a strike against a speaker, but worse than that, the speaker had muddy bass and tinny highs. Some mid-range sounds that would normally be barely noticeable in the background sit right out in front with the Metal, as if they were the focus of the song.
And that curve really butchers some songs. If you enable their EQ, it just gets worse. It seems to trend a bit quiet and does a poor job of cutting out noise from wind, but it does a good enough job to get by for the price.
The one part where it really does fall flat is the fact that it only has a single microphone, which is mounted on the bottom. While this is fine for phone calls in areas with little background noise, it makes it extremely hard for the phone to perform any noise cancellation, makes it harder to hear the subject when recording a video, and can have a dramatic effect on call audio.
The two audio tracks are identical, provide no real benefit, and only serve to increase file size, but there are two of them. We are very pleased to see that Ulefone released the kernel sources for the Ulefone Metal, and they did it in an acceptable amount of time to boot.
That developer friendliness is already starting to pay dividends. As for Ulefone, it appears that they are providing some updates, and even included a decently laid out changelog, which is fantastic to see.
We will have to see how this progresses, but if Ulefone can build upon this stepping stone, they may be able to find a niche and build a loyal development community for their products.
The Ulefone Metal looks and feels like a nice phone, but its rough edges and the tough competition at that price point prevent me from recommending it. While the Metal is lacking, it does show great potential for the future.
The build feels solid, the spec sheet ticks almost all of the boxes for the price point, and Ulefone seems to be putting a legitimate effort into their developer relations. There are just a couple major nagging issues that need to be fixed.
If Ulefone can 1. Enter your email to be subscribed to our newsletter. Steven grew up wishing he could take the internet everywhere with him. With a background in accounting, he strives to bring a unique perspective to the tech journalism world.
XDA Developers was founded by developers, for developers. It is now a valuable resource for people who want to make the most of their mobile devices, from customizing the look and feel to adding new functionality.
The quick settings menu is almost unchanged, with the only major differences being a change in logo for the cellular data symbol and the addition of a toggle which launches a pop-up for audio profiles separate from the do not disturb toggle.
The settings menu saw a more drastic change however. These icons are bright colours that feel a bit out of place next to the the rest of the UI, especially when compared to the relatively muted camera and settings icons that Ulefone used.
Ulefone also has a persistent notification giving you a quick link to the app permission management page. The only way to get rid of it is to disable permission management which Ulefone makes nice and easy to do for some reason, and even then it comes back every once in awhile like when you reboot.
The default launcher comes with two pages dedicated specifically to music and photos, with a giant record player on one with no visible playback controls, and a small photo gallery on the other which only lets you see up to two photos at a time, and both are rather shrunken at that with a substantial amount of wasted space.
Thankfully both pages can be removed in the settings menu. The menus and shutter button in the camera have a distinctive Gingerbread feel to them, with certain parts taking on a bit more of a transparent Holo-esque design.
The sound recorder similarly feels out of place. The UI just feels like a mishmash of different styles. That may fly under the radar while Ulefone is a small company, but doing things like that now leaves them open to copyright lawsuits later on if they grow.
Yes, the logos fit well with the majority of the UI and certainly fit better than the old Gingerbread-style stock Gallery app that Google has abandoned, but there are other options that also would fit, and without being copyright infringement at that.
The camera icon follows Material design fairly well, and fits with the rest of the UI. It really is a shame that Ulefone felt that copyright infringement was a better path than continuing to create their own logos.
I understand the appeal of a floating quick actions tile, but I never really found any benefit in this one, and it only ended up getting in the way for me. I normally take a few tries to get my phones to learn my fingerprint, and the Ulefone Metal is no exception there.
What was an exception was that the Ulefone Metal has the ability to bind the fingerprint sensor to open different apps for different fingers. This can be a very useful feature, but in this case it brought a major issue.
The settings gear to access it is very small and hard to hit with my big clumsy hands, with most of my attempts to access it resulting in me opening the menu for choosing which app to activate with that finger instead.
It got to the point where I just gave up, and left the phone without a working fingerprint sensor, which is really a shame. Thankfully, it is an issue that could be relatively easily fixed with a software update.
You just make the bounding box be a square from the top of the row to the bottom of the row and the same width, instead of just barely covering the target object itself. You can even place a small visible separator to help people identify where the button ends and the rest of the row begins.
While the device does let you hot swap SIM cards, it can be a bit slow to recognize the change, resulting in a bit of a wait after you put a SIM card in before you can use it, or a bit of a wait after you take the SIM card out before the data connection stops.
The Ulefone Metal also has a weird design choice in that any time you come within range of an open Wi-Fi network, it notifies you. If your phone is set to vibrate, it vibrates.
If your phone is set to ring, it rings. While phone SoCs have come a long way, there is still a substantial performance gap between a flagship SoC like the Snapdragon or Exynos, and an entry level chip like the MediaTek MT The eight A53 cores running at 1.
The experience is designed with the intent of competing with Qualcomm Snapdragon 4xx and 61x series chips, and it shows. As a result, the Ulefone Metal suffers heavily in single core tests, but the eight A53 cores allow it to perform reasonably in multi core tests.
This shows up very clearly in Geekbench, where the phone is barely able to hit in single core testing, but multi-core testing from idle sees it hitting a respectable score of, about half of what the flagship chips are putting up currently.
After seeing the results of the other benchmarks, Basemark held no major surprises either. This test barely fazes most devices that we review, and this result shows substantially higher temperatures than even the Snapdragon devices that were known for throttling as a result of overheating.
There is no excuse for a phone getting so hot that you can barely hold it. Even temperatures in the high 30s, which the Ulefone Metal hits after just a couple minutes of use, can a be a bit uncomfortable.
Something in the 50s is outright hot to the touch. Although it was already pretty close to 0 anyway. Towards the end of the test, performance drops a little bit, but you really should expect more throttling from a device that is getting this hot and continuing to get hotter as the test ended.
This is helped further by the fairly lean OS that the phone runs by default. The storage is about on par with what would be expected for the price tested on Androbench, threads set to 1 and sequential buffer size set at kB.
While 16GB with an SD card is enough to get by on although I tend to prefer 32GB and higher, and while the performance is definitely on the slower side, it is acceptable for the price.
The OS generally performs fairly smoothly, but there are a couple weird hangs in certain places. Some of the bugs are just strange. In the default launcher, when you long press an app icon to move it, usually it will stay on the page it is currently on, but occasionally it will jump to the primary home screen even if that screen is full.
Setting up the cellular data connection for the first time is a bit of a pain. The phone defaults to data being turned off which is a good idea to some extent, but after inserting a SIM card it asks you if you wish to enable data for that SIM card.
The scroll friction on the Ulefone Metal seems to have been set very high. In the settings menu, anything other than a heavy swipe will only travel a short distance. Signal strength appears to be fairly weak.
The phone supports Band 7 LTE for which there are multiple towers near my house, but I had to walk almost right next to the tower before I could get connection.
If the WCDMA band 5 support is truly too poorly optimized to even be announced, then it likely should have been disabled through software until a point in time at which it is ready for use as, if the claim is true, leaving it enabled could potentially cause a host of other issues.
Unfortunately, we could not find any, so we reached out to Ulefone again to see if they could direct us to the filing information which they are required to keep on hand for CE.
Upon learning that the Ulefone Metal is likely unlicensed to use WCDMA band 5, I switched the phone into airplane mode, and have not re-enabled the cellular radio since.
The camera hardware is interesting in some ways. That being said, there is a lot more to sensor quality than just the size and resolution. While there is some interesting discussion to be had about alternate ways of interpreting image data from Bayer filter sensors, the differences between pixels and sensels, and super-resolution photography, Ulefone does not appear to have leveraged any of them.
In the images below are resized crops of 13 MP and 8 MP photos taken consecutively, and most of them either appear to be either so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable, or are even slightly in favour of the 8 MP version.
Seeing these results, we reached out to Ulefone again, and they confirmed that there was no secret sauce here. Interesting hardware choices and questionable scaling decisions aside, there still remains the question of whether the Ulefone Metal has a good camera, and the answer is no.
In the non-HDR images, it somehow manages to almost completely blow out the sky, while simultaneously underexposing the rest of the image. The HDR images for the Ulefone are a bit better, reducing the amount of clipping and brightening up some of the dark areas, but it also crushed the blacks a bit for reasons unknown.
For reference, here is what the histogram for the same picture taken with an HTC 10 looks like. The very leftmost and rightmost bars in each image represent the amount of clipping.
Unfortunately this trend was not limited to the first picture set. The worst part of the camera appears to be the lens, and that really shines through in pictures that require substantial dynamic range to be captured properly.
The night shots with streetlights in them came out as such a blurry mess that I started to doubt whether I had actually cleaned the lens properly. So, I gave the lens an extra thorough wipedown and went out to test it a second time, and got the same results.
The images from the Moto E are particularly telling in this instance. It really leaves us wondering how the Ulefone Metal could have performed with better glass. The HDR images are a bit more interesting in some ways.
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23.03.2018 - Substratum The ultimate, most complete theming solution for Android. In the settings menu, anything other than a heavy swipe will only travel a short distance. The sound recorder similarly feels out of place. Free stuff for microsoft windows 7 lumia 640 - Imp... It was so bad that the HTC 10 without flash performed about as well as the Metal with flash. Upon learning that the Ulefone Metal is likely unlicensed to use WCDMA band 5, I switched the phone into airplane mode, and have not re-enabled the cellular radio since. If the WCDMA band 5 support is truly too poorly optimized to even be announced, then it likely should have been disabled through software until a point in time at which it is ready for use as, if the claim is true, leaving it enabled could potentially cause a host of other issues.
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11.02.2018 - XDA Feed The best way to get cutting edge news about your device! The experience is designed with the intent of competing with Qualcomm Snapdragon 4xx and 61x series chips, and it shows. I normally take a few tries to get my phones to learn my fingerprint, and the Ulefone Metal is no exception there. Need a mhl adapter for a asus zenfone 2e - Bluetoo... While the Metal is lacking, it does show great potential for the future. The HDR images for the Ulefone are a bit better, reducing the amount of clipping and brightening up some of the dark areas, but it also crushed the blacks a bit for reasons unknown.
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10.02.2018 - Last, and certainly least for photography on the Ulefone Metal, is the flash. The eight A53 cores running at 1. Oneplus x vs oneplus 2 8 4 berkshire steam locomot... I normally take a few tries to get my phones to learn my fingerprint, and the Ulefone Metal is no exception there. Not only is the back button on the right which to be fair, despite what Google recommends, is preferred by somebut the multi-tasking button is instead bound as a menu buttonand a long press of home is how you access multi-tasking.
Compare Ulefone Armor 2 with other smartphones. Ulefone Armor 2 full specifications, features, Availability, HK Warehouse Ulefone /5(1). As the name of this Android phone suggests, the Ulephone Armor 2 is an extremely tough and powerful smartphone. It features an IP68 waterproof design that makes it. For Ulefone Armor 2, Armor 2S, Premium Leather AGOZ Pouch Case Holster car charger suitable for Ulefone Armor and all Amazon Warehouse Great Deals on.
The storage is about on par with what would be expected for the price tested on Androbench, threads set to 1 and sequential buffer size set at kB. While 16GB with an SD card is enough to get by on although I tend to prefer 32GB and higher, and while the performance is definitely on the slower side, it is acceptable for the price.
The OS generally performs fairly smoothly, but there are a couple weird hangs in certain places. Some of the bugs are just strange. In the default launcher, when you long press an app icon to move it, usually it will stay on the page it is currently on, but occasionally it will jump to the primary home screen even if that screen is full.
Setting up the cellular data connection for the first time is a bit of a pain. The phone defaults to data being turned off which is a good idea to some extent, but after inserting a SIM card it asks you if you wish to enable data for that SIM card.
The scroll friction on the Ulefone Metal seems to have been set very high. In the settings menu, anything other than a heavy swipe will only travel a short distance. Signal strength appears to be fairly weak.
The phone supports Band 7 LTE for which there are multiple towers near my house, but I had to walk almost right next to the tower before I could get connection. If the WCDMA band 5 support is truly too poorly optimized to even be announced, then it likely should have been disabled through software until a point in time at which it is ready for use as, if the claim is true, leaving it enabled could potentially cause a host of other issues.
Unfortunately, we could not find any, so we reached out to Ulefone again to see if they could direct us to the filing information which they are required to keep on hand for CE. Upon learning that the Ulefone Metal is likely unlicensed to use WCDMA band 5, I switched the phone into airplane mode, and have not re-enabled the cellular radio since.
The camera hardware is interesting in some ways. That being said, there is a lot more to sensor quality than just the size and resolution. While there is some interesting discussion to be had about alternate ways of interpreting image data from Bayer filter sensors, the differences between pixels and sensels, and super-resolution photography, Ulefone does not appear to have leveraged any of them.
In the images below are resized crops of 13 MP and 8 MP photos taken consecutively, and most of them either appear to be either so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable, or are even slightly in favour of the 8 MP version.
Seeing these results, we reached out to Ulefone again, and they confirmed that there was no secret sauce here. Interesting hardware choices and questionable scaling decisions aside, there still remains the question of whether the Ulefone Metal has a good camera, and the answer is no.
In the non-HDR images, it somehow manages to almost completely blow out the sky, while simultaneously underexposing the rest of the image. The HDR images for the Ulefone are a bit better, reducing the amount of clipping and brightening up some of the dark areas, but it also crushed the blacks a bit for reasons unknown.
For reference, here is what the histogram for the same picture taken with an HTC 10 looks like. The very leftmost and rightmost bars in each image represent the amount of clipping. Unfortunately this trend was not limited to the first picture set.
The worst part of the camera appears to be the lens, and that really shines through in pictures that require substantial dynamic range to be captured properly. The night shots with streetlights in them came out as such a blurry mess that I started to doubt whether I had actually cleaned the lens properly.
So, I gave the lens an extra thorough wipedown and went out to test it a second time, and got the same results. The images from the Moto E are particularly telling in this instance. It really leaves us wondering how the Ulefone Metal could have performed with better glass.
The HDR images are a bit more interesting in some ways. The Ulefone Metal definitely sees some improvements in foreground brightness, but the red tint only gets worse, and the limitations of the poor quality glass show through just as strongly.
Last, and certainly least for photography on the Ulefone Metal, is the flash. The flash is extremely weak, to the point where I almost cannot imagine a situation in which it would be useful.
In the flash test below, I took pictures of a tiny hill in relative darkness with a couple different phones. In this test, most of the phones lit up most of the hill, with the HTC 10 even lighting up the whole thing including the small trees on top.
In fact, it barely was able to light up my own feet when I pointed it directly downward. It was so bad that the HTC 10 without flash performed about as well as the Metal with flash.
Now, admittedly, I rarely use flash when taking photos, instead trying to find better lighting and finding ways to use longer exposures whenever possible, but sometimes you simply cannot avoid it.
The closest I found was a manual ISO setting hidden away in a menu. Video defaults to an H. The camera has a slow motion video mode, which are all the rage right now. The camera is one of the worst smartphone cameras I have used to date, and I have a feeling the image sensor is not to blame.
Poor quality glass, an unintuitive UI, and questionable software decisions come together to make for a very poor photography experience. The front facing camera is atrocious. The display gets surprisingly bright for an entry level phone, outshining my Moto E, and the white point calibration feels pretty decent if a bit blue at times.
Most noticeably, colour shift starts appearing fairly heavily at even a 45 degree angle, and there is some backlight bleed although it is fairly uniform on our test device.
It pains me to say this, as battery life is one of the features that I care the most about, but the Ulefone Metal has fairly bad battery life. Even a light benchmark like PCMark killed it in 4 hours on minimum brightness on certain runs on a freshly wiped device.
For comparison, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 with its 5. Unfortunately, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is causing the issue. Even in airplane mode on minimum brightness where the WiFi power usage should have no effect, the phone could only eke out 7 hours and 20 minutes of PCMark.
The Ulefone Metal is louder, but the S2 still has much clearer audio. The HTC Legend a midrange phone from almost 7 years ago was louder than the Ulefone Metal by a significant margin, thanks in part to its front-facing speaker, but it was really tinny and had almost no bass and I have reason to suspect that the speaker on my HTC Legend might be damaged….
Just being back-mounted alone is a bit of a strike against a speaker, but worse than that, the speaker had muddy bass and tinny highs. Some mid-range sounds that would normally be barely noticeable in the background sit right out in front with the Metal, as if they were the focus of the song.
And that curve really butchers some songs. If you enable their EQ, it just gets worse. It seems to trend a bit quiet and does a poor job of cutting out noise from wind, but it does a good enough job to get by for the price.
The one part where it really does fall flat is the fact that it only has a single microphone, which is mounted on the bottom. While this is fine for phone calls in areas with little background noise, it makes it extremely hard for the phone to perform any noise cancellation, makes it harder to hear the subject when recording a video, and can have a dramatic effect on call audio.
The two audio tracks are identical, provide no real benefit, and only serve to increase file size, but there are two of them. We are very pleased to see that Ulefone released the kernel sources for the Ulefone Metal, and they did it in an acceptable amount of time to boot.
That developer friendliness is already starting to pay dividends. As for Ulefone, it appears that they are providing some updates, and even included a decently laid out changelog, which is fantastic to see.
We will have to see how this progresses, but if Ulefone can build upon this stepping stone, they may be able to find a niche and build a loyal development community for their products.
The Ulefone Metal looks and feels like a nice phone, but its rough edges and the tough competition at that price point prevent me from recommending it. While the Metal is lacking, it does show great potential for the future.
The build feels solid, the spec sheet ticks almost all of the boxes for the price point, and Ulefone seems to be putting a legitimate effort into their developer relations. There are just a couple major nagging issues that need to be fixed.
If Ulefone can 1. Worse still, their marketing implies that they actually went and made their product worse by including a screen protector that is designed to reduce colour accuracy instead of a normal one in their half-hearted attempts to attract that crowd.
The UI is nice and clean with an approach that stays relatively close to stock Android. The quick settings menu is almost unchanged, with the only major differences being a change in logo for the cellular data symbol and the addition of a toggle which launches a pop-up for audio profiles separate from the do not disturb toggle.
The settings menu saw a more drastic change however. These icons are bright colours that feel a bit out of place next to the the rest of the UI, especially when compared to the relatively muted camera and settings icons that Ulefone used.
Ulefone also has a persistent notification giving you a quick link to the app permission management page. The only way to get rid of it is to disable permission management which Ulefone makes nice and easy to do for some reason, and even then it comes back every once in awhile like when you reboot.
The default launcher comes with two pages dedicated specifically to music and photos, with a giant record player on one with no visible playback controls, and a small photo gallery on the other which only lets you see up to two photos at a time, and both are rather shrunken at that with a substantial amount of wasted space.
Thankfully both pages can be removed in the settings menu. The menus and shutter button in the camera have a distinctive Gingerbread feel to them, with certain parts taking on a bit more of a transparent Holo-esque design.
The sound recorder similarly feels out of place. The UI just feels like a mishmash of different styles. That may fly under the radar while Ulefone is a small company, but doing things like that now leaves them open to copyright lawsuits later on if they grow.
Yes, the logos fit well with the majority of the UI and certainly fit better than the old Gingerbread-style stock Gallery app that Google has abandoned, but there are other options that also would fit, and without being copyright infringement at that.
The camera icon follows Material design fairly well, and fits with the rest of the UI. It really is a shame that Ulefone felt that copyright infringement was a better path than continuing to create their own logos.
I understand the appeal of a floating quick actions tile, but I never really found any benefit in this one, and it only ended up getting in the way for me. I normally take a few tries to get my phones to learn my fingerprint, and the Ulefone Metal is no exception there.
What was an exception was that the Ulefone Metal has the ability to bind the fingerprint sensor to open different apps for different fingers. This can be a very useful feature, but in this case it brought a major issue.
The settings gear to access it is very small and hard to hit with my big clumsy hands, with most of my attempts to access it resulting in me opening the menu for choosing which app to activate with that finger instead.
It got to the point where I just gave up, and left the phone without a working fingerprint sensor, which is really a shame. Thankfully, it is an issue that could be relatively easily fixed with a software update.
You just make the bounding box be a square from the top of the row to the bottom of the row and the same width, instead of just barely covering the target object itself. You can even place a small visible separator to help people identify where the button ends and the rest of the row begins.
While the device does let you hot swap SIM cards, it can be a bit slow to recognize the change, resulting in a bit of a wait after you put a SIM card in before you can use it, or a bit of a wait after you take the SIM card out before the data connection stops.
The Ulefone Metal also has a weird design choice in that any time you come within range of an open Wi-Fi network, it notifies you. If your phone is set to vibrate, it vibrates.
If your phone is set to ring, it rings. While phone SoCs have come a long way, there is still a substantial performance gap between a flagship SoC like the Snapdragon or Exynos, and an entry level chip like the MediaTek MT The eight A53 cores running at 1.
The experience is designed with the intent of competing with Qualcomm Snapdragon 4xx and 61x series chips, and it shows. As a result, the Ulefone Metal suffers heavily in single core tests, but the eight A53 cores allow it to perform reasonably in multi core tests.
This shows up very clearly in Geekbench, where the phone is barely able to hit in single core testing, but multi-core testing from idle sees it hitting a respectable score of, about half of what the flagship chips are putting up currently.
After seeing the results of the other benchmarks, Basemark held no major surprises either. This test barely fazes most devices that we review, and this result shows substantially higher temperatures than even the Snapdragon devices that were known for throttling as a result of overheating.
There is no excuse for a phone getting so hot that you can barely hold it. Even temperatures in the high 30s, which the Ulefone Metal hits after just a couple minutes of use, can a be a bit uncomfortable.
Something in the 50s is outright hot to the touch. Although it was already pretty close to 0 anyway. Towards the end of the test, performance drops a little bit, but you really should expect more throttling from a device that is getting this hot and continuing to get hotter as the test ended.
This is helped further by the fairly lean OS that the phone runs by default. The storage is about on par with what would be expected for the price tested on Androbench, threads set to 1 and sequential buffer size set at kB.
While 16GB with an SD card is enough to get by on although I tend to prefer 32GB and higher, and while the performance is definitely on the slower side, it is acceptable for the price. The OS generally performs fairly smoothly, but there are a couple weird hangs in certain places.
Some of the bugs are just strange. In the default launcher, when you long press an app icon to move it, usually it will stay on the page it is currently on, but occasionally it will jump to the primary home screen even if that screen is full.
Setting up the cellular data connection for the first time is a bit of a pain. The phone defaults to data being turned off which is a good idea to some extent, but after inserting a SIM card it asks you if you wish to enable data for that SIM card.
The scroll friction on the Ulefone Metal seems to have been set very high. In the settings menu, anything other than a heavy swipe will only travel a short distance. Signal strength appears to be fairly weak.
The phone supports Band 7 LTE for which there are multiple towers near my house, but I had to walk almost right next to the tower before I could get connection. If the WCDMA band 5 support is truly too poorly optimized to even be announced, then it likely should have been disabled through software until a point in time at which it is ready for use as, if the claim is true, leaving it enabled could potentially cause a host of other issues.
Unfortunately, we could not find any, so we reached out to Ulefone again to see if they could direct us to the filing information which they are required to keep on hand for CE.
Upon learning that the Ulefone Metal is likely unlicensed to use WCDMA band 5, I switched the phone into airplane mode, and have not re-enabled the cellular radio since. The camera hardware is interesting in some ways.
That being said, there is a lot more to sensor quality than just the size and resolution. While there is some interesting discussion to be had about alternate ways of interpreting image data from Bayer filter sensors, the differences between pixels and sensels, and super-resolution photography, Ulefone does not appear to have leveraged any of them.
In the images below are resized crops of 13 MP and 8 MP photos taken consecutively, and most of them either appear to be either so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable, or are even slightly in favour of the 8 MP version.
Seeing these results, we reached out to Ulefone again, and they confirmed that there was no secret sauce here. Interesting hardware choices and questionable scaling decisions aside, there still remains the question of whether the Ulefone Metal has a good camera, and the answer is no.
In the non-HDR images, it somehow manages to almost completely blow out the sky, while simultaneously underexposing the rest of the image. The HDR images for the Ulefone are a bit better, reducing the amount of clipping and brightening up some of the dark areas, but it also crushed the blacks a bit for reasons unknown.
For reference, here is what the histogram for the same picture taken with an HTC 10 looks like. The very leftmost and rightmost bars in each image represent the amount of clipping.
Unfortunately this trend was not limited to the first picture set. The worst part of the camera appears to be the lens, and that really shines through in pictures that require substantial dynamic range to be captured properly.
The night shots with streetlights in them came out as such a blurry mess that I started to doubt whether I had actually cleaned the lens properly. So, I gave the lens an extra thorough wipedown and went out to test it a second time, and got the same results.
The images from the Moto E are particularly telling in this instance.
Coments:
No sir...