Yu Televentures, Micromax’ sister brand, is back with yet another budget offering, Yureka Black, amidst reports suggesting that the brand is shutting down soon. The phone is the reincarnated version of Yu’s one the most popular smartphone, Yureka and comes with a price tag of Rs 8,999. It will available from June 6 on Flipkart.
The brand has upgraded the smartphone with some solid looks and impressive hardware change. As the name suggest, it flaunts a new Black colour as well. With the competition becoming intense, especially in the budget segment, every other smartphone makers are trying to give their best to outlast the competitions. We have brands like Xiaomi, which is seeking to bite a large chunk of market share in this segment, with a back to back launches of this year’s Redmi series.
So the question here is: Will Yu Black outlast the competition and help Yu Brand to gain its lost momentum or not? We got the chance to use this device for a brief time and here is our first impressions.
Design and Display
Starting with the design department, the phone does manage to distinguish itself from other similar-looking smartphones available in this segment, and you can thank the all-black look and metal unibody design for this. The smartphone has a robust yet compact construction, which is a welcome move. Though when you compare Yureka Black with Redmi 4, one will find that the former looks slightly taller than the latter. Also, Redmi 4 feels a bit lighter as compared to Yureka Black. That said, we quite liked the design language of the device.
At the front, you will find a 5-inch screen with minimal side bezels, along with a fingerprint sensor at the base and a front flash accompanied by an earpiece and front shooter is situated at the top. The navigation controls are on-screen. The right houses volume controls and power on/off button, while on the left, there is hybrid SIM slot, which means one can use either two SIMs or one SIM and micro SD card. At the top, you will find the Headphone jack, while at the base there is microUSB port flanked between two speaker grilles.
At the back, you will find a slight curved around the edges, which makes it comfortable to hold and a glossy finish, which gives a premium look. There is a primary camera situated at the top centre position, and just beneath it, one will find a dual LED flash. At the base of the back panel, one will find Yu’s logo, which is a bit hard to find (the glossy back is to be blamed) and silver-colour Antenna lines run across the top and bottom of the phone. Overall, the Yureka Black is certainly a good-looking smartphone, which is compact enough to fit in your hands.
On the display end, the phone features a 5-inch Full HD display with a screen resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels. The screen is protected by a 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection, which the company boast is scratchless. The display has some good viewing angles, though some find might find it a bit reflective in nature. The colour output looks good during our brief testing period, but still, we will suggest you wait for our review for an in-depth testing of the display.
Hardware and Software
Yu has added some interesting internals in Yureka Black. The phone is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 Processor clocked at 1.4GHz. It is backed by a 4GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage out of which 9.31GB is reserved for the system. The storage can be further expanded up to 64GB via micro SD card slot. Though it is too early to comment on the performance part, looking at the sheer specs sheet, we might have an arch rival of the recently-launched Xiaomi Redmi 4. So stay tuned with us to find out whether it is at par Xiaomi’s latest budget offering.
On the software end, the phone runs on a dated Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow which gives a Stock Android feel. The company has added some features like smart gesture, which can be accessed by pulling down the upper left corner of the screen. There is some default gesture like drawing ‘O’ will open the camera, letter ‘M’ will open music and so on. Users can choose different gestures to launch an app, call someone or send an SMS. We will talk more about this and other features during in our review.
Camera
On the camera front, it comes loaded with a 13-megapixel rear camera along with dual LED flash and an 8-megapixel front shooter with a flash as well. The camera UI looks pretty clean and comes loaded with some interesting modes like Face Beauty, Panorama, HDR, Night, Sports, Scene Frame and Super Pixel. The modes can be accessed by swiping right in the camera app, while one can see all the setting by a left swipe. Though the features and specs look promising, it would be interesting to the overall performance of the camera in different lighting situations.
Battery and Connectivity
On the battery front, you get a 3000mAh non-removable battery and the smartphone support connectivity options like 4G VoLTE, WiFi (802.11 b/g/n), Bluetooth, GPS/GLONASS, a microUSB port and Dual SIM support.