While Micromax’s image as a brand has certainly seen a downfall for some obvious reasons and trying to create a new one with a different name, they came up with the Yu brand. Yureka, the first smartphone from this new brand comes with two major USPs: 4G LTE connectivity and the price. As you may be aware of the dealing between Micromax and Cyanogen, which lead to OnePlus One developing their OxygenOS, as a company was not allowed anymore to ship devices with CyanogenMod OS in India. But keeping it on the side. Let’s move on with Yureka Review.
Design
The Yu Yureka with a 720p display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor, 2GB RAM and a camera combination of 13MP and 5MP shooters is already a killer deal for the price. Providing a highly customizable ROM is an added advantage.
With regards to the build quality, that is one of the areas of concern for us; we criticize Yureka for the way it feels in hand. “Cheap plastic & a Chinese phone” is what we felt when holding the device for the first time, and the fact remains the same even after the usage for about a couple of weeks.
Oddly placed buttons, the back cover pushing itself out on the sides and the speaker placement – all add up to make this device stand far from the best-designed budget devices. The volume rocker button is oddly placed, with that being unintentionally pressed whenever we had to stabilize the device to press the power button. The buttons should have been lowered or kept on the right side, below the power button.
Display
The 5.5-inch display on the Yureka comes with the 720p HD resolution. One of the best displays, you get for the price, with the HD resolution. But at the same time, green and blue dominates over the other colors and that makes the picture a bit unnatural.
Sunlight readability is good, as the phone doesn’t come with a reflective screen. There’s adaptive brightness feature, which makes reading a little easier under the sunlight. The sharpness is good and the only issue is with the color saturation. Viewing angles are decent as well, but not the best out there.
Software
The major factor for us to recommend the Yu Yureka would be only the CyanogenMod in it. The OS looks extremely good, responsive, and there’s a lot of customization and personalization options included in the CyanogenMod, which is based on Android 4.4.4 KitKat. It isn’t different from what you see on the OnePlus One as well, but only a few features exclusive for OnePlus are missing here. Not a big deal though, as CyanogenMod is always intuitive and open to options.
More positively, for this price bracket, the user is getting more than what is expected. Like themes, full customization of fonts, icons, and home screens is possible, and if you change the theme to the default one which is seen on the OnePlus One, there is hardly any difference you would see on the UI. The only issue I saw was swiping on the AOSP keyboard is a bit of the struggle. As well as it doesn’t guess the words correctly.
Camera
The camera is not excellent but is decent enough on daylight. You can check out the Yu Yureka camera review, and read below for our final words about the 13MP shooter of this device. Clearly, it is not only the megapixel count that accounts for quality of the end capture.
So overall, the Yu Yureka’s 13-megapixel rear camera doesn’t do a great job but still a fine job in capturing pictures in broad daylight, and lightens the subject quite a bit in low light, which added a lot of grains. The zooming at 6x zoom led to zero details in both photo and video recordings. There is no use of such zooming capability when the end quality is worst.
Hardware & Performance
Performance wise, the Yureka seems to take upload to quite an extent. May that be multitasking or some heavy games, I’ll keep my thoughts limited to performance and not hardware heat-up issue: The device performs perfectly in all ways. There are no lags noticed even after taking photos, editing them a little and sharing them on social networks, and switching back to some other apps. In short, the combination of Snapdragon 615 and CyanogenMod 11 can take up the load neatly.
The major issues we found during the usage are with the hardware heating up. While it got heated up even while browsing the web on data network, which was okay. But at the same time, when playing GTA Vice City, the temperature rose up to 46-degree in just about 15 minutes. That is nowhere near acceptable, taking away all the experience. If the heating on the back wasn’t enough, the screen area on the top as well gets heated a lot. That is what is going to touch the skin while you are talking on the phone, and you would hate that feel.
Cons
The Yureka does not feel great in hand. It had smudges that were clearly visible when you use it with wet hands, or some oily surface is touched upon. For a device with a large 5.5-inch display, it felt unusually light, as the device may be made out of cheap plastic.
The device got heated up a lot, and that is not what one would like about their device. So, say goodbye to playing games if you are buying this device, as it heats up to 46 degree within 15 minutes of play.
The speaker has a very low volume output and is placed on the back, which makes it even worse when the device is lying on the desk.
Final Verdict
While the CyanogenMod can be one simple reason someone would want to purchase this smartphone, it fails with the battery and display. Camera cannot be called poor, as it does the job decently. When the phone couldn’t last for more than half a day on 3G data network, there are lesser chances for us to recommend the Yureka over the competitors, although Yureka might argue well for some other factors such as the OS, and for the price.
