Yu Yutopia First impressions: Yu's flagship phone along with AroundYU software service bundled in

Yu Televentures has finally launched its flagship phone - the Yu Yutopia - at an event in New Delhi. The phone, which according to founder and CEO Rahul Sharma was 10 months in the making will start selling from 26 December at Rs 24,999 exclusively on Amazon. Apart from the phone launch, Sharma also announced Yu Televentures’ foray into the services space with the AroundYU service aggregator launch.

After the event, we spent some time with the phone. Here are our first impressions of the Yu Yutopia.

Build and Design

The Yu Yutopia comes in an all metal unibody design and according to Yu it has used aircraft grade aluminum in the construction. The phone measures only 7.2mm thick, but that’s excluding the bump caused on the rear side due to the camera section. The phone had rounded corners around the edges and it maintains the Saturn rings feature on the camera, placement of the 3.5mm jack in the center on the top edge, having the speaker grill section at the base on the rear side and so on. The in-hand feel of the phone is good, although it is slippery.

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On the front you have the three soft keys at the base. The dual SIM card slot is present on left hand side takes in a micro SIM and nano SIM card, it’s a hybrid slot. Yutopia also carries on the 3 element buttons on the right hand side from its younger siblings. On the rear side just below the prominent camera section, you have the finger print scanner which is rounded in shape.

Display

The Yu Yutopia comes with a 5.2inch QuadHD Sharp LCD display which gives a 515ppi pixel density. The phone comes with a Corning Concore Glass protection. Yu has also used one glass solution and comes with what it calls the true black display.

The colours appear good with natural colours and decent viewing angles. The text was crisp. But there weren’t any demo videos to check out so we will reserve our thoughts for later. The screen does tend to collect fingerprints though.

Chipset, RAM, Storage

Considering this is the flagship phone, Yu Yutopia has employed the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset with a 2GHz octacore processor and Adreno 430 GPU. It comes with 4GB RAM and has 32GB of on board storage. The phone also gives you the option to expand the storage using a microSD card.

With the limited time we had with the phone it worked smoothly, but we need to run the phone through its paces to give a proper outlook on the performance. There wasn’t any lag that we noticed while switching apps or with animations.

Software and OS

Just like its predecessors, the Yu Yutopia runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop along with Cyanogen 12.1 OS atop it. The Cyanogen OS brings along with it a lot of customisations such as Themes, app permissions, detailed camera app and so on.

But the main draw with the Yu Yutopia is the Around YU service aggregator that was announced today. Around YU is basically a service aggregator that bypasses the need to have certain apps installed on your phone. By default you get options such as Food, Shopping, Cab, Flight, Hotel, Bus and Train and YU plans to add more services such as movies for instance.

YU has invested as well as tied up with specific partners to provide the services on the Around YU service. It can be accessed by swiping to the left most home screen. You can simply enter the search term in Around YU with regards to the service you want and instead of opening an app for that service you get a listing within Around YU itself from where you can take the necessary action.

At the moment for the cab service Around YU has Ola, for the Food section there’s a tie up with Zomato and for flights, buses and trains Yu is using the Ixigo service for travel data. YU has plans to add more services and partners to this service in the near future.

Camera

Yu Yutopia houses a 21MP rear camera with the Sony IMX320 sensor  with an f/2.2 aperture and comes with phase detect auto focus function. On the front you get an 8MP camera with a 5 element lens. It also features optical image stabilisation. The rear camera section juts out of the plane of the phone body.

The camera interface is similar to what we have seen on most Cyanogen OS sporting phones. Yu claims that the phase detect AF can lock onto focus quickly, but we noticed that indoors it was taking noticeable time to lock on focus. We need to use the camera extensively to see how it fares against the competition. On the video front, the Yu Yutopia is capable of shooting 4K videos at 30fps and can also shoot slow motion HD videos at 120fps.

Battery, Connectivity

The Yu Yutopia comes with a 3000mAh Li polymer battery and it also supports the Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 feature. We will be able to comment on the battery only after reviewing the phone.

The phone sports a hybrid dual SIM card slot along with 4G LTE support. Along with this you get WiFi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS with AGPS and so on. The phone has a microUSB port for charging and data transfer.

Conclusion

After a year of its launch Yu Televentures has released its much hyped Yutopia at Rs 24,999. The phone also comes bundled with the Little Bird earphones. In addition to the hardware, Yu has also bundled in Around YU which is a services aggregator which eases the use of services across categories.

As a package, the Yu Yutopia certainly looks good on paper, be it in terms of display, chipset, design as well as camera. But the Snapdragon 810 chipset is known to run hot and we will need to use the device thoroughly to see how well the heat is managed. Also considering it sports a QuadHD display we will need to see how the battery life holds up on the Yutopia.

We need to see how relevant is the proposition offered by Around YU. The company has big plans around the offering which will be released gradually. But will it completely bypass the need to download apps with its current, but limited, support? You will have to wait till we review the phone to know that.