Micromax’s online venture YU Televentures launched its second phone on May 12, called the YU Yuphoria along with a YU Fit Band which will work with a health tracking service powered by HealtifyMe. Unlike the YU Yureka, the YU Yuphoria is priced at Rs 6,999 and is aimed at the budget segment. Coming in two colours, Buffed Steel with black cover and Champagne Gold with white cover, the YU Yuphoria will go on sale on May 28 and the registrations for the same have started at 5PM on Tuesday. Just like its predecessor, the Yuphoria will be selling on Amazon.
We had a chance to use the phone for some time after the launch and here are our first impressions of the device.
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. We noticed that the cover itself isn’t that sturdy. The metallic frame is rounded and gives a good grip on the phone, helped in part by the matte finish on the rear cover.
On the top you have a 3.5mm audio jack and at the base there’s the microUSB charging port. On the right hand side there are the metallic volume rocker buttons with the power/standby button bang in the middle.
The design on the rear side is reminiscent of the Nokia Lumia 830 with the camera placed in the centre of the top half region. The camera has metallic rings surrounding it and an LED flash unit is placed on the left side. At the base you have the grills for the speaker section and the YU branding.
The front portion has a 5-inch display with thick bezels on the top and bottom. The display comes with a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection.
The YU Yuphoria comes with a 5-inch HD display with a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. Thanks to the IPS panel, the viewing angles are good. The display looks vibrant. But according to YU, since the display is fully laminated it gives better legibility in sunlight. We will have to test this claim when we are testing the device.
The YU Yuphoria houses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 SoC that we’ve come to see on budget devices off late. The Snapdragon 410 houses a 64-bit 1.2GHz quad core processor along with Adreno 306 GPU. It has 2GB RAM and 16GB storage. You can expand the storage using the micro SD card slot accessible on removing the battery cover. While the demo unit seemed to run smoothly, we will need to run benchmarks, games and heavy apps to get a complete picture of how smooth the YU Yuphoria is.
The YU Yuphoria supports 4G LTE bands in regions where its applicable and it comes in dual-SIM configuration. Apart from this it has Wifi 802.11n, Bluetooth v4.0, GPS and sensors such as a gyroscope, compass, proximity sensor and so on.
An 8MP rear and a 5MP front camera are seen on the device. The 8MP camera comes with an f/2.2 aperture and has a 1.4 micrometer pixel size. It is capable of shooting full HD videos as well and the Yuphoria camera also supports slow motion (120fps and more) movies. The 5MP front camera has a f/2.0 aperture and a wide angle lens for selfie enthusiasts. The user interface on the camera is similar to what was seen on the YU Yureka as well as the OnePlus One. We will need to test the camera in various conditions to start talking about the image quality.
YU Yuphoria houses a 2230mAh battery which is removable. The YU Yuphoria also supports Quick charge 1.0 which let you charge the phone from 0 to 65% in 45 minute according to YU. We will naturally be testing these claims.
Since the Yuphoria belongs to the YU line, it comes pre loaded with Cyanogen 12 atop the Android 5.0 Lollipop OS. The Cyanogen OS Skin maintains the Android 5.0 design language but at the same time YU has added some software finesse with the Cyanogen OS.
For instance Themer is a feature that let’s you change the themes / look of certain supported apps. The phone also offers some features such as an inbuilt Truecaller dialler app, Audio FX for tweaking the audio output, email service called Boxer and so on. These are choices offered to the users over the default Google apps. This seems like a step in the direction of making Cyanogen OS offer non Google apps. Apart from this you have some YU specific software as well such as YUniverse and HealthYU.
‘Miracle in Metal’ goes the tagline of the YU Yuphoria and it is one of the only device to come with a metal frame body at a Rs 6,999 price point. The phone looks good and the metal frame will no doubt attract a lot of buyers. On the software front too, you are getting the latest OS along with a lot of features to tweak the appearance of your phone. We will have to see how the phone performs in the real world scenario to give a final verdict. While there are many phones such as the Lenovo A6000, Motorola Moto E, Xiaomi Redmi 2, the build of the Yuphoria certainly makes it stand apart. Will good looks be accompanied by good performance as well? We will find out soon in our full review.
