Ufone Smart U5, A Pocket friendly Android Smartphone [Review]

Ufone recently launched a 3G enabled Android smartphone with fairly decent specifications in the market ─ and that too at a ridiculously low price of Rs. 5,999. As a result it got a tremendous response from customers and with in a week or so, this phone was sold-out at almost all locations in the country.

While Ufone has promised to refill the stock in the coming week, we’ve prepared a short review of this device for your consideration. Let’s begin with the un-boxing and hands-on tour of this device:

Design:

Ufone smart U5 phone is a modified version of b.social 4 phone from the UAE based company, Emitac Mobile Solution. At first glance it looks like a Y-series phone from Huawei, and the back pattern also resembles with Y300.

This phone is almost 118.5mm tall, 63mm wide and 10.7mm thick. The body is made of plastic, and currently it is sold only in black color.

Due to its size, Ufone U5 feels good in hands. Its easy to hold, control and operate.

The build quality of this phone is reasonable and the materials look sturdy. I haven’t tried but if you happen to drop this phone from 4-5 feet height, I suspect that it can survive unless you drop it face down.

The front side features 4 inch IPS display with WVGA resolution (480×800). Though its an IPS panel but the viewing angles aren’t so great, however the color saturation and brightness levels are good. You won’t notice the low resolution of this device unless you are watching some high definition videos or playing 3D games.

The default Ufone wallpapers have a low resolution and makes the screen look bad, so don’t forget to use a custom wallpaper.

One thing you must keep in mind is that this screen doesn’t feature any kind of protective layer and will attract scratches quickly, so the use of screen protector is recommend (one protector is provided in the box).

Above the screen there’s the regular array of earspeaker, proximity & light sensors and 0.3-megapixel camera.

Three touch sensitive keys are placed just below the screen, unfortunately these are not lit and you will find it hard to use them in low lighting conditions.

Power/unlock key is placed on the right and volume rocker is on the left, both of these can be reached using one hand only. Headphones jack is on top and microUSB port along with microphone are placed on the bottom.

The back hosts a primary 5-megapixel snapper along with a single LED flash light. The black plate has curved edges and a texture, which makes it quite comfortable to hold.

Removing the back plate reveals a loudspeaker just above the camera, surprisingly there is no grille on the back plate. As a result you will get muffled sound and a lot of vibration while listening to songs at high volume.

You’ll also find microSD, mini SIM and battery slots under the cover. You can easily use a microSIM card in this slot, however you have to adjust the nanoSIM carefully so it touches the connectors.

One more thing I’ve noticed that the SIM card slot is up side down, so if you are getting no SIM card errors, don’t freak out.

This phone is network locked to Ufone only, so you won’t be able to use other network SIM cards unless you unlock the phone first.

Operating System & UI:

Smart U5 phone runs on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean operating system with no customizations, so you will get pure Android experience.

Most of our readers would be familiar with Vanilla Android ─ there are couple of homescreens, where you can put some shortcuts and widgets, an app drawers which lists all of installed applications on the phone in chronological order and swiping from top brings notifications drawer with quick toggles.

Google Apps and some other apps like; Facebook, BB Messenger and Snapdragon Battery Guru comes pre-installed with this phone. There is also a Ufone 3GVAS application, which as per description allows you to make and receive 3G videos calls, however every time I’ve tried to make a call, it gives “not supported” error message.

Ufone website mentions that this phone could be upgraded to the latest flavor of Android (KitKat 4.4). However it doesn’t feature OTA (Over the air) updates and I assume that users have to visit the CSC or download a patch from the Ufone website to upgrade their devices.

Hardware & Performance:

Smart U5 features Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 chipset, a quad-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz and 400MHz Adreno 305 GPU. It packs 512MB of RAM and 4GB ROM. It can also take microSD cards up to 32GB.

The hardware specs aren’t so phenomenal and the RAM seems quite low for an Android phone, however at this price this the best you can get. Nevertheless the performance of this device is remarkably reasonable.