Yu Yunicorn with MediaTek Helio P10 chipset launched in India at Rs 12,999

After plenty of teasers, Yu has finally launched its Yunicorn smartphone in India. Yu will start accepting registrations for its first sale from 31 May at 2PM and the smartphone will be exclusively sold on Flipkart in the Rush Gold option. The smartphone will be available in Rush Silver and Graphite options in the coming months. The Yu Yunicorn will be priced at Rs 12,999 for the first month and from the second month onwards will be available at Rs 13,499 instead of Rs 14,999.

The smartphone seems less flagship and more mid-range, considering its MediaTek Helio P10 internals. To give you a comparison the X10 inside the LeEco Le 1s Eco delivers similar performance so this is indeed not a flagship smartphone but more of a mid-range device.

The smartphone has been constructed out of aluminium, is just 8.15mm thick and features a 2.5D arc glass on the front. Also visible on the front is the fingerprint reader that resides in the home button. The Yu Yunicorn packs in a 5.5-inch  Full HD LCD display on the front. Inside, we get a quad-core 1.8GHz MediaTek Helio P10 paired with 4GB RAM and 32GB of internal storage that is expandable up to 128GB using a micro SD card.

There is a 13MP camera on the back and 5MP camera up front and Yu has packaged its Social Cloud feature (by MiMedia) for storing and sharing photos and videos. The Yunicorn also supports DTS audio. The battery is expected to be a 4000mAh unit and Yu claims that it should last a casual user about 4 days on a single charge.

Coming to software, Yu still sticks to modded version of Cyanogen called Android on Steroid  or AOS. Apart from cutting down and making the OS more stock, there is nothing new here apart from an updated version of Around YU. Updated to version 2.0 Around Yu gets new features and improvements to existing ones. Medical section is a new entry that will let users consult a doctor straight from the Around YU app using video calls. The consultations are not free of cost. Version 2.0 also brings a new e-wallet feature that lets you pay for various services straight from within the app. The Medical feature will be launched next month and comes from Yu’s partnership with Lybrate. The e-wallet feature is a result of a partnership with TranServe. After the main event Yu also unveiled Project Highway a developer program for its open sourced approach. The source code and repositories for all of its Yu smartphones will be available to the developer community at  developer.yuplaygod.com . Developers can add new features and those will be approved an added to upcoming firmwares.