Following the success of Xiaomi, numerous small smartphone companies have stepped into Indian consumer market. Based on the similar sales strategy of offering higher price-to-specification smartphones, the OnePlus One too became a major hit in the country.
Next came Infocus, an US based company that offered a Foxconn made smartphone M2 in a throw away price. Another popular Chinese smartphone monster Meizu has also confirmed its entry in the Indian subcontinent. And now, UMI a less known Chinese smartphone brand is also stepping in the country.
Debuting with an entry level smartphone named Zero, the smartphone is offering a flagship level specification in an entry level price. Featuring an elegant design, the smartphone offers several features usually seen in flagship smartphones.
Launched in US at $299.99, the UMI Zero is currently available at $219, which roughly translates to ₹13,000, little more than Yu Yureka and Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 and less than Xiaomi MI4 and OnePlus One. Expected to be available by first week of April, the UMI Zero might achieve similar overnight success as Xiaomi MI3 did last year. Here are the 6 key reasons why it might be a success.
Design
While UMI has been very careful with the build materials for the phone, it comes as a surprise that a brand would offer front and back glass bodied smartphone at such a throw away price. According to the manufacturer, Zero features aviation-grade aluminum-magnesium alloy chassis to give it a rugged yet elegant feel.
The Zero also features Corning Gorilla Glass3 for the display and the back. Though the device looks quite like Sony's Xperia Z phones, the quality Zero offers is appreciable in its price.
Zero Figure
The UMI Zero measures just 6.4mm with a height of 146mm. When the device was debuted in China, Zero was touted as the slimmest smartphone in the world. However, Oppo has snatched away the slimmest smartphone crown by unveiling the Oppo R5. But the Oppo R5 is a flagship smartphone and costs much higher than the UMI Zero.
Display
The UMI Zero packs a Samsung manufactured 5-inch Super AMOLED display panel with 1080x1920 pixels resolution at 441 Pixels-per-Inch. The advantage of featuring Super AMOLED display is they don't require any backlight hence the displays are energy efficient. Though the Super AMOLED displays offer a tad over saturated colours, they offers decent contrast ratio thus the images and text appears brilliant in the display.
Performance
The UMI Zero Android Smartphone packs a 2GHz MediaTek MTK6592 Turbo processor with ARM Mali 450MP4 GPU and 2GB RAM memory. The processor is powerful enough to achieve similar benchmarking scores with Snapdragon 800 SoC. The MediaTek SoC runs eight Cortex A8 cores, which can run simultaneously to achieve powerful performance.
Camera
On the camera front, the UMI Zero houses a 13-megapixel Sony IMX214 f/1.8 rear camera with dual LED flash and a fast 0.3 second autofocus for snapping quality images rapidly. Most of the smartphones in the similar or above price range offers f/2.0 hence the UMI Zero rear camera can be faster than them and achieve greater quality images in low light with apt detailing.
The smartphone also packs an 8-megapixel front camera for clicking selfies.
Fast Charging and Expandable Memory
The UMI Zero packs a 2780mAh battery with a fast charger, which claims to charge the Zero smartphone up to 51 percent in just 14 minutes. The manufacturer also claims the fast charger is able to give you two and half hours of battery life by charging the smartphone for 5 minutes.
Featuring 16GB in built memory, the UMI Zero also offers a micro SD card slot to expand the storage capacity 64GB more. The feature is appreciable since the higher end devices like Xiaomi MI4 and OnePlus One sacrifices the micro SD card slot.
