"I'm not an iPhone 6 Plus, indeed." This was the slogan used by Ulefone to advertise their flagship "Be Touch". Quite a brave stunt by them to market a device that can at least partially be called an iPhone 6 Plus knock-off. Now with such a slogan they put the mark on a very high level, since one expects them to deliver a device that can at least almost keep up with Apple's current flagship. But is that the case or is the Ulefone Be Touch miles away from being an iPhone 6 Plus alternative? Let's figure it out!
Unboxing
The Ulefone Be Touch is delivered in a standard Ulefone packaging that doesn't look anything like premium. Inside we find the usual stuff including a wall charger, USB cable, screen protector and user manual. Surprisingly they even packed headphones this time, but those are just the usual cheap ones we usually throw away immediately since they just sound awful.
Design
The Ulefone Be Touch really looks a lot like the iPhone 6 Plus, but can be distinguished by the real deal at the very first look. The phablet features a nice, slightly curved metal frame that gives it a premium-touch along the 2.5D curved glass screen and the home button with its chrome-ring and the built-in fingerprint scanner. A strange design decision by Ulefone is that they didn't place a status LED on the front, which really is a must-have for any device that's called a flagship. Instead of the status LED they decided to place an LED flash for the front camera. The rear is made from polycarbonate and the camera really stands out there due to its huge metal ring around the lense. For some this might look nice, to us it looks cheap. The cheap feeling of the plastic back cover just intensifies this impression. The overall build quality is fairly good, but it's the small details that don't make the Ulefone Be Touch appear as nice as it could be.
Display
Now screens are one of the most important parts about smartphones and unfortunately Ulefone somehow screwed it up. The phone comes with a 5.5-inch 720p panel and while as a matter of fact there are a lot of great 720p panels with that size available, Ulefone simply did choose the wrong one. Colors don't look good and show a slightly yellow-ish tint, the contrast isn't that good and we also don't like the touch panel which often recognizes fast inputs during typing as swipes, which is really annoying. The only good parts about the screen are brightness, automatic brightness control and its viewing angles which are pretty good. All in all we would've wished to see a much better panel on the Ulefone Be Touch.
Hardware
The Ulefone Be Touch comes with the specs you typically see with a mid-range phone from China these days. That includes the powerful MT6752 64-bit octa-core SoC, 3GB of RAM and 16GB of memory. Performance-wise this combination often exceeds expectation of people, especially among those who are used to the older 32-bit Mediatek chipsets which always were kinda crappy. Still, as a matter of fact, most manufacturers still manage to screw it all up by using crappy software on their devices. Luckily that's not the case with the Ulefone Be Touch.
Software
And this already leads us to the next topic which of course is the software you get with the phone. The Ulefone Be Touch runs Android 5.0 Lollipop and this time Ulefone did a very good job with this OS. It comes with MiraVision and everything you need, plus they got rid of most bugs other Lollipop devices suffer from. The overall performance is very good and we didn't encounter any crashes. There are a few issues though, which mainly apply to the camera and the fingerprint sensor. Especially the fingerprint sensor isn't working well at all, which probably is caused by a bad driver or something. We heard that some people don't have any issues with it, while others indeed have. We belong to the latter group and can certify that the sensor wasn't usable at all for us. It apparently depends on the user and we hope Ulefone will do something about that soon.
Audio
If you prefer phones that are able to play your music in a decent quality with their internal media speakers, the Ulefone Be Touch obviously isn't for you. The speaker sounds awful, overdrives too fast and doesn't offer any bass playback at all. Luckily the audio quality of the headphone jack is flawless, so those of you with a good pair of headphones won't have any issues. The quality of the device during phone calls is on an average level.
Reception Quality
We didn't encounter any issues with the Ulefone Be Touch here. 2G, 3G and also 4G networks worked flawlessly. Maybe not on high-end level, but definitely above average. That certifies that Ulefone used good antennas this time, which comes handy in areas with limited signal strength. Wi-Fi did work flawlessly as well, just with one router we had some connection issues – but well, those things happen from time to time. GPS also works very well with a 15 satellites fix and 2 meters of accuracy. It just could be a little faster since the fix took us about 30 seconds. Those of you regulary using tracking apps and navigation should be very satisfied with the performance though.
Camera
Ulefone claims the Be Touch to feature a Sony IMX214 sensor which for itself is kind of guarantee for good camera performance. Or isn't it? Well, when you take some pictures with the Be Touch you for sure will not believe that this is supposed to be a Sony IMX214 camera. The results look awful. The sharpness is overdriven, the colors look bad, the contrast looks bad, the camera has huge issues with complicated lighting… should we go on? Well, as a matter of fact, the Be Touch indeed features the IMX214 sensor. We took it apart just for you guys and verified that. So why does it look that awful? It's all about software of course. Really, often the software part is more important than the sensor part itself. That being said we can only say that Ulefone should do something about that ASAP, since what the Be Touch delivers at this time is absolutely unacceptable considering what it COULD do in theory.
Battery
The Ulefone Be Touch is advertised to ship with a 2,550mAh battery. In reality the capacity probably is a bit less, but not much, which we appreciate after all those battery lies we've been confronted with recently. Thanks to the 720p panel and the well optimized software, we didn't have any issues getting throughout a day with a single charge without having to limit the usage. It didn't last into the night though, so we had to plug the charger at about 7:00 – 8:00 PM. Something we love about the Ulefone Be Touch is its fast-charging. It only takes 90 minutes until the battery is full, which is a lot faster than with most other devices.
Ulefone Be Touch Review: Verdict
Ulefone apparently tried hard to create something special with the Be Touch, but failed with it since they didn't pay enough attention to the small details. Once again they rushed onto the market with that device too fast, overlooking some significant flaws that now prevent us from giving you a full purchase recommendation. The issues with the fingerprint scanner, the awful camera, the bad audio speaker and the crappy display – all those flaws shouldn't be there on a device that is advertised to be an iPhone 6 Plus alternative. Also, the successor of the device, the Ulefone Be Touch 2, just went on pre-order which alone is reason enough to skip the Ulefone Be Touch.
That being said we wanna thank Geekvida.de / Pandawill.com for providing us with the review sample. If there are any questions left, make sure to drop a comment.
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| Model: | Ulefone Be Touch |
| Processor: | Mediatek MT6752 |
| GPU: | Mali T760 |
| RAM: | 3GB |
| Memory: | 16GB |
| Frequencies: | GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 (band5,band8,band3,band2) WCDMA: 850/900/1900/2100 (band5,band8,band2,band1) FDD-LTE: 800/1800/2100/2600(band20,band3,band1,band7) |
| Screen: | 5.5-inch 720p IPS OGS |
| Camera Front: | 8MP |
| Camera Rear: | 13MP Sony IMX214 |
| SIM: | DualSim (1x Micro, 1x Standard) |
| Micro SD: | Yes |
| Sensors: | Digital Compass, Hall Effect Sensor,Helligkeits Sensor, Touch Sensor, Digital Compass |
| Housing: | Metal, Polycarbonate |
| Dimensions: | 158.1 x 77.4 x 8.6mm |
| Weight: | 160g |
| Accessories: | Manual, headphones, USB cable, wall charger |
| OS: | Android 5.0 Lollipop |
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