Ulefone Be Pro Review: A Worthy OnePlus One competitor

Battery

I didn’t know what to think when it came to the Ulefone Be Pro. On one hand, it had the brand spanking new MTK6732 that is supposedly 30% more power efficient than the MTK6592. On the other hand, they paired a decidedly subpar battery capacity (2600mAh) with a large 5.5″ display. Would battery life be good? Bad? Or just average due to those two components averaging each other out? I performed the tests and found out. I will be comparing this phone’s battery life to others such as the Galaxy S5 and Xperia Z3. GSMArena does 3 key battery tests on its phones, namely calling, web browsing and video. As I do not have the resources to do all three tests, I only performed the web browsing test and the video test (who am I going to talk to for 47 hours anyway?).

I set the screen brightness to 250 nits and installed Web Reloader from the Google Play Store and used it to reload webpages over WiFi every few seconds. First, I reloaded the mobile version of the CNN home page every 10 seconds Then I transitioned to http://www.focalprice.com and reloaded that every 30 seconds. Finally, I used http://www.gearbest.com and reloaded this page every 30 seconds for the rest of the time. The phone finally died after 5:36 of browsing. The Xperia Z3 manages 9:46 of browsing time with just a 3100mAh battery.
In the video playback test, the screen brightness was 250nits and a standard definition video played. GSMArena also set this test up similarly, except they turned on airplane mode, I chose not to do this in order to better replicate real life, as videos are not usually watched while in airplane mode (unless in an actual airplane). The phone played back video for 8 hours and 30 minutes.

On a more “normal” battery test, the phone was off the charger for a total of 18 hours. During that time, WiFi, data, and GPS (High Accuracy) was always on. Double tap to wake was always activated as well. I unplugged my phone at 5:50am and plugged it back in around 1pm . I racked up a total of 3 hours of screen on time, which consisted of 1 hour of google maps navigation, about 1/2 hour of Clash of Clans/Boom Beach and Feedly, which drained my battery from 100% to 70%. I also installed and ran a Speedtest on 4G. as well as installing Real Racing 3 on WiFi which was a 500MB download.

I did a standby battery test with WiFi connected, data on, GPS on, as well as double tap to wake enabled. The battery drained about 1% per hour on standby.

Charging the phone from 0% to 100% took about 2 hours.

The MTK6732 processor seems to be a lot more power efficient than the MTK6592, using up less of the phone’s battery. The battery will get you throughout moderate to heavy use for a day, but do not expect two day battery life.

Software & Performance

Ulefone has already provided a video (On February 14) showing Android 5.0 Lollipop running on the Ulefone Be Pro, so you are pretty much guaranteed an OTA update to Lollipop. We can look forward to Lollipop’s “Project Volta” which will increase the phone’s standby time, supposedly giving a Nexus 5 an extra 90 minutes of power. We’ll see how it improves this phone’s battery life.

So lets talk about the Be Pro’s 4.4.4 version of software. Have I mentioned that I have not used a chinese phone that is as smooth as a Nexus device, OnePlus One or an HTC One M8? Well, now there is. Smooth to the touch, a sensitive and properly calibrated touch screen, this phone just responds when you put your finger on it. Launching apps is instant, on par with the OnePlus One. Another issue I’ve had with my other chinese phones is that swyping using Google Keyboard and Swype had a “laggy” gesture trail, which other devices including the Moto G had perfectly responsive gesture trails. The Ulefone has fixed this as well.

It includes a version of Samsung’s Air Gesture that uses the proximity sensor, that is surprisingly useful when you have dirty hands and are trying to cook and read recipes at the same time.

Smart Gestures seem to be a staple in all chinese phones nowadays. For those who don’t know what smart gestures are, it allows the user to draw certain gestures on the screen while it is off to launch certain applications, for example drawing an “M” on the screen would launch music. It also allows the user to wake the device by double tapping on the screen or swiping up on the screen. These smart gestures use up more battery life as it prevents the phone from entering deep sleep, so it is a trade off on features vs battery life.

It also includes very basic notification control in the settings, you can change the notification light to 5 different colours and edit the settings for basic notifications like calls, SMS, calendar, etc.

It has multiple languages as well, check out the video (Timestamp 7:32) at the top of the review to see if your language is supported.

Ulefone partitioned the internal storage well. Unlike other phones that partition 4GB or so for the phone and partition the rest as the “SD-Card”, they partitioned all the 16GB so all of it is useable.

With a Mali T-760 graphics chip, this phone pulled off gaming without a hitch. Coupled with 2GB of RAM and a 720p resolution, intense games such as Real Racing ran buttery smooth. Other popular games like Clash of Clans also ran perfectly well.

I ran Antutu as well, and obtained a score of 31894, while the video review showed a score of 30920, which is lower than expected due to running Antutu 3 times in a row, heating up the phone resulting in thermal throttling.

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