Yu Yunique review: For the first-time budget 4G smartphone buyer

Yu Televentures, the online only arm of Micromax Informatics has been around since the beginning of the year and has been consistently launching phones. The latest in its series is the budget focussed Yu Yunique which was launched earlier this month in New Delhi. The Yu Yunique is the fourth phone in the portfolio and is aimed clearly at the budget buyer. Also unlike previous Yu phones, the Yunique comes with stock Android 5.0 Lollipop and you get the option to install Cyanogen OS on it. So let us see if this is the budget phone to go for. Build and Design: 6/10 Yu Yunique looks quite similar to the Yu Yuphoria from the front with the YU branding on top of the glass. The phone comes with a 4.7-inch display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. At the top of the glass, there is a slight cut out for the earpiece speaker section. The bezels at the top and bottom could have certainly been thinner. It weighs 128 grams and measures 8.3mm thick. The Yu Yunique has rounded edges and the rear cover has a nice rubbery feel to it, which gives a good grip on the phone. Thanks to the 4.7-inch form factor, the phone fits easily in the hand and one handed operation is easy. For the power/standby and volume rocker buttons, it borrows the same design element from the Yu Yuphoria with the power button surrounded by volume buttons. But we noticed that the edges of the volume rocker buttons are sharp and it kind of scratches the skin if pressed on too hard. At the top you have the 3.5mm audio jack in the centre and the base has the micro USB charging and data transfer port. On the rear side there is the Saturn Rings inspired 8MP rear camera with an LED flash unit. Features: 6.5/10 Yu Yunique comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 SoC which houses a 1.2GHz quad-core processor and an Adreno 306 GPU. It comes with 1GB of RAM and has 8GB of internal storage out of which 4.61GB is available to the user. But you can expand the storage to 32GB via the microSD card slot. On the connectivity front, you get a dual micro SIM card slot and it supports 4G LTE bands (TDD 2300MHz Band 40 and FDD 1800MHz Band 3) along with 2G and 3G SIM cards. You can use only one 4G card at a time. Apart from this it supports Wi-fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0, A2DP, GPS with A-GPS and GLONASS. There is no NFC or Infrared support. Software: 6/10 Unlike the previous Yu phones, the Yunique does not come pre-loaded with Cyanogen OS, but instead with a stock Android 5.1.1 OS. So apart from the standard set of apps, there aren’t many customisations on the Yunique. You do get some proprietary apps such as YUniverse, which is more of a customised Opera browser for Yu devices, but that’s about it. Display: 6/10 The Yu Yunique comes with a 4.7-inch HD display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. It has a 312 ppi pixel density. For a budget smartphone display it’s good. But the display isn’t very bright and at over 50 per cent brightness, it looks a bit washed out. While videos and games look good, it does not give a very high contrast ratio. Overall, the display has a slight blue tinge to it. Also thanks to the collection of smudges on the surface, you will have to constantly keep cleaning the phone. Performance: 6/10 Call quality on the Yu Yunique was quite good and the earpiece speaker is loud enough to be audible in traffic. Thanks to the clean Android 5.1.1 OS, the phone did not have many slowdown issues. However, the 1GB RAM can be limiting if you tend of do a lot of multi-tasking, and you will have to shut down some apps. The phone does get warm on gaming and games such as Dead Trigger 2 only offer low and medium presets. But we did not notice instances where it heated up to alarming levels. The speaker section is located on the rear side, and it is loud enough to be audible in a single room. But some amount of distortion is audible on the maximum sound level. Unlike the Yu Yuphoria, the default onboard keypad was quite responsive. The benchmark scores are at par with other Snapdragon 410 SoC sporting phones. All in all, a decent performer for an entry level phone. Camera: 5.5/10 The Yu Yunique sports an 8MP camera with a large f/2.0 aperture on the rear side and there is a wide-angle 2MP front camera. While the front-camera is mediocre in terms of image quality which was waxy on most occasions, the rear camera is relatively better. The camera user interface gives a quick one-touch access to HDR, Portrait, Sports, Snow modes and so on. Also the settings button gives a single drop down menu from which you can make your selections. So navigating the camera menus is simple. You get usable photographs only if there is sufficient lighting around - best only for shooting outdoors, as indoor photographs show noise. Low light photographs are quite bad. Needless to say focussing in low light is also slow. Also we noticed that the camera on the Yunique does not give an ideal output in the HDR mode, specially when there is tricky lighting situation. The third image in the series below shows blown out top portion, when the camera was in HDR mode and metered for the cars. You don’t always get a balanced image in high contrast HDR situations. Also in some cases we noticed purple fringing in images. All in all, the camera on the Yunique is average and good enough for sharing stuff online. It is also capable of shooting full HD videos, which are quite average so long as the camera is steady. Panning will cause rolling shutter to be evident. PS: Please click on images to download the high res files Battery Life: 7/10 The Yu Yunique comes with a 2,000mAh non-removable Li-ion battery. This can surely annoy a lot of potential buyers. Considering it has a 4.7-inch HD display, we were able to pull in a proper work day which involved calling, video streaming, listening to music, messaging, clicking some photographs and surfing the web. The PC Mark for Android benchmark gave an on-screen time of 7 hours which is decent. Verdict and Price in India The budget smartphone segment has been heating up in the last couple of years and with the Yu Yunique, there is a new benchmark when it comes to affordable 4G smartphones pricing. The Yu Yunique has been positioned to compete with the Lenovo A2010 (priced at Rs 4,990) and it does edge past it in certain departments. At Rs 4,999, the Yu Yunique is clearly meant for the first time smartphone users and for that segment, the Yunique does deliver. Sure there are flaws such as the average display and camera performance, but things such as good battery life, 4G support are a definite plus. The non-removable battery may put off many potential buyers though and also the fact that this is one phone which has to be bought via the registration - flash sale model. If you are on a tight budget, you can opt for this phone. But if you want a slightly better battery life and camera, and are willing to extend your budget, then the Xiaomi Redmi 2 Prime at Rs 6,999 is worth considering.