YU Yureka Black Review

YU Yureka Black smartphone was launched earlier this month in India at Rs 8,999. It is seen as a comeback phone for Micromax’s YU Televentures, which has been lying low since August 2016. The last two smartphones from YU’s portfolio were YU Yureka S and YU Yunique Plus, and those were incremental upgrades over earlier devices. The Yureka Black comes in an overcrowded segment, mostly dominated by Xiaomi smartphones. The big highlight of Yureka Black is its 4GB RAM and 32GB storage. We got a chance to review the Yureka Black, and here’s what we found out.

YU Yureka Black review

The dual-SIM Yureka Black supports 4G VoLTE bands in India. It includes a hybrid SIM-tray on the left, which means you can either put in two SIM cards (Nano-SIM + Nano-SIM) or one SIM card and a microSD card at one time. The handset features a 5-inch full-HD (1080 x 1920 pixels) 2.5D curved Corning Gorilla Glass 3 display. The fingerprint sensor is on the home button right below the display.

The volume rocker and power/ lock key can be found on the right. There is a 3.5mm jack on top edge, while the Micro-USB port can be found between the two speaker grilles at the bottom. Out of the two speaker grilles, the left hides the primary microphone and right includes loudspeaker. On the camera front, it sports a 13-megapixel rear camera with dual-LED flash and the front camera is an 8-megapixel shooter. It is backed by a 3000mAh battery.

YU Yureka Black’s fingerprint sensor is on the home button

YU Yureka Black Design, Display review

Yureka Black as the name suggests is all black colour smartphone from YU. It comes in two black colour finish options – Chrome Black and Matte Black. We got the Chrome Black version for review and it surely is slippery and a fingerprint magnet. The body is made of metal (at least the big chunk of back plate) and it has a plastic-like coating on top, similar to iPhone 7 Jet Black variant. We haven’t got a chance to see the matte black variant as yet, but we would recommend you to buy that anyway because the glossy Yureka Black is prone to smudges and scratches.

The design of the Yureka Black is very similar to Xiaomi phones, and it is good looking. The front features a physical home button with the fingerprint sensor. The overall compact handset feels lightweight and is quite nice to hold.

YU Yureka Black’s 5-inch 2.5D curved display doesn’t get scratched easily

Coming to the display, the YU Yureka Black features a 5-inch full-HD (1080 x 1920 pixels) 2.5D curved Corning Gorilla Glass 3 screen with 440ppi pixel density. The screen is reflective, but not as glossy as the rear panel. The brightness levels are good enough for most light conditions but extremely bright situations (or direct sunlight) might be an issue. The colours appear a bit oversaturated on Yureka Black’s display. The touch accuracy is fine, and one good thing we noticed over the period of time is that the display didn’t get scratched easily as we had anticipated. YU is providing users with an extra screen protector in the retail box.

There are two nifty features that we liked for the display. You can enable double tap on screen to wake and double tap on home button to sleep gesture from the Settings > Smart Action. YU has put in one-hand mode option in the display settings as well. Once it’s enabled, you simply need to swipe (right or left) on the three touch keys (Back, Home and Recent).

YU Yureka Black Performance, Camera review

YU Yureka Black packs an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 (MSM8937) 64-bit Processor. The big highlight of the phone is its 4GB RAM and 32GB onboard storage. Unfortunately YU ships it with bloatware, and hence users only get about 22.5GB of free storage upfront for use. The handset gets a hybrid SIM slot, which means you do have an option of expanding storage further up to additional an 64GB via a microSD card, if you do not use two SIM cards. In our opinion, you might not need extra storage, and 22GB should be enough for most users.

Coming to the performance of Yureka Black, the phone works smooth with multi-tasking and you get enough RAM to keep multiple apps open in the background. The phone does heat a little, but to our surprise it wasn’t much in our review device. Talking about the gaming performance, the phone does struggle with heavy-duty games despite it having 4GB RAM. But there were occasional app crashes on this smartphone. From a normal day-to-day users’ perspective, you would be happy with the performance. To put some numbers in perspective, Yureka Black in Antutu 6 benchmark scored 44,110. In GeekBench 4 single core, it scored 653 and multi-core result was 2074.

The Yureka Black features a primary 13-megapixel rear camera with phase detection auto-focus (PDAF), dual-LED flash and Sony IMX258 sensor. The front camera is an 8-megapixel shooter, which also includes front facing selfie flash. During the review, we found that the primary 13-megapixel camera can click good shots in daylight. The images look sharp and in focus.

Back of Yureka Black Chrome variant is shiny and glossy like the iPhone 7 Jet Black variant

The detailing as well as dynamic range was decent too in daylight or well-lit shots. The problem comes in low-light or dark situations. Indoor shots with slightly low light tend to look smudgy. It lacked detailing and sharpness too. The almost dark situations don’t get anything until you turn on the flash light. About the front 8-megapixel selfie camera, it’s a pleasant surprise. It takes almost no time to focus and images look sharp and in focus. The stock app, however, isn’t great. To switch the camera, you need to swipe to right and then find ‘Switch camera’ option between number of other options, which is mostly a painful experience. If you like filters, then unfortunately those are not available either.

YU Yureka Black Battery, UI review

YU Yureka Black features the fingerprint sensor on the home button. We found that the sensor lacks accuracy and isn’t fast either. We mostly ended up unlocking the device with pattern or password as the scanner only works around 60 to 70 per cent of the time.

Yureka Black runs Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with slightly tweaked UI, which occupies about 9.50GB space out of device’s 32GB internal storage. We initially thought this runs an almost stock UI, but turned out that isn’t the case. You do not get the app drawer, and instead all apps remain on the home screen. The UI doesn’t take much from stock Android, and tweaks done are ugly. The good news is that YU is all set to push out latest Android 7.1.2 Nougat stable OTA “in next one and a half months”. As of now the Android 7.1.2 Nougat Beta Build update is available to manually download, and install through YU’s developer forum.

The handset is backed by a 3000mAh battery, which doesn’t support fast charging. In our review time, the full charging took about 2 hours 10 minutes with company’s 5V/ 1.5A charger unit. The Micro-USB charging port at the bottom edge of the phone also supports USB-OTG, which works well too. Talking about the battery backup, the YU Yureka Black’s battery will be sufficient for one day if your usage consists of browsing social media apps, calls, and a little bit of video watching. In our case, the phone could maximum go about 8 hours, and we’d say the overall battery is still impressive.

YU Yureka Black Verdict

YU Yureka Black is overall a decent smartphone at Rs 8,999. The phone is a powerhouse and won’t let you let down on multi-tasking. The selfie camera is much better than you’ll probably find in any smartphone in this price range. If you are considering anything from an offline market at this price, then Yureka Black is any day a much better smartphone. Since it’s an online-only phone as of now, it’s biggest competition is Xiaomi’s Redmi 4’s 3GB RAM variant, which shares the same price.