Following Xiaomi's success in India now most of the major Chinese smartphone makers are stepping in the country with their respective budget phones. Several companies debuted their smartphones this month.
Coolpad, famous for making MX4 Ubuntu edition smartphone, has entered the Indian market with its 2 budget phones, including Dazen 1 with an affordable price of ₹6,999.
In the beginning of May, Micromax's sub-brand Yu Televentures had launched Yu Yuphoria in the similar price bracket. Two other smartphones with huge potential available in the market are Xiaomi Redmi 2 and Lenovo A6000.
Lenovo's exclusive seller, however, has permanently discontinued A6000 and is now selling its better variant A6000 Plus for ₹7,499.
So, the options available for ₹6,999 are Micromax Yu Yuphoria, Coolpad Dazen 1 and Xiaomi Redmi 2. Let's find out which one offers more value for money by comparing their specifications.
Design
Coolpad and Xiaomi offer similar matte finished plastic backed candy bar design, while Yu Yuphoria comes with a metal frame and a much premium design. The build qualities of all three smartphones are equally good, but the metallic frame of Yu Yuphoria gives it a sturdier yet fancy look.
Display
Yu Yuphoria and Dazen 1 both feature a 5-inch display, while Xiaomi Redmi comes with little smaller 4.7-inch screen. All the 3 smartphones offer 720x1280 pixels resolution but differ in PPI count for the unequal measurement. Yu Yuphoria and Dazen 1 come with 294PPI count, while Redmi 2 offers a higher 312PPI display.
Yu Yuphoria and Redmi 2 come with a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection for surviving the display from accidental scratches, while Dazen 1 lacks it.
All three phones offer decent viewing angles and appreciable colour balance, but Redmi 2 offers little better display than the rest.
Processor and RAM
Interestingly, Dazen 1 and Yu Yuphoria pack identical Snapdragon 410 SoC backed by 2GB DDR3 RAM. Considering the identical display quality, both the phones are expected to deliver similar performance in real life and in Artificial Benchmarking.
Although Xiaomi Redmi 2 packs the similar system on chipset, it lacks in RAM by offering just 1GB. In our earlier synthetic benchmarking test, Redmi 2 scored 20,376 in Antutu Benchmarking 5.6.2, leaving its predecessor Redmi 1s behind by a small margin.
With GeekBench 3 benchmarking test, Redmi 2 scored 472 in single core and 1392 in multi-core test. In Quadrant Standard, Redmi 2 achieved 11806. In the Vellamo MultiCore test, Redmi 2 achieved 1247 in comparison to Moto G's 1357.
Operating System
Both Xiaomi Redmi 2 and Coolpad Dazen 1 are powered by Android 4.4 KitKat OS, overlaid with their homemade user interface. While Coolpad Dazen 1 runs on Cool UI, Xiaomi Redmi 2 runs on MIUI user interface.
However, despite packing numerous utilities inside an intuitive interface, this section goes to Yu Yuphoria for running on Android 5.0 Lollipop based CyanogenMod 12 ROM. CyanogenMod ROM offers several useful utilities and retains the much hyped Android Lollipop's material interface.
Camera
All three smartphones come equipped with 8MP rear camera with similar f/2.2 aperture. On the front, Yu Yuphoria and Dazen 1 pack a 5MP camera, whereas Redmi 2 offers an inferior 2MP camera.
Reading the configuration, we assume all the three cameras would be able to click decent images in ambient lighting environment and may offer noises in the challenging light conditions. But you can't expect more in the given price.
Battery and Storage
At 2500mAh, Dazen 1 offers the best battery in the segment. Redmi 2 and Yu Yuphoria come with almost similar batteries of 2200mAh and 2230mAh capacities respectively.
Yu Yuphoria also offers the best storage among the three with its 16GB inbuilt storage. Redmi 2 and Dazen 1 come with 8GB ROM, out of which nearly 70 per cent of storage remains free.
Our Say
Given the better design, double storage, RAM and the advanced operating system, we found Yu Yuphoria a tad better than the other two smartphones. However, Redmi 2 and Dazen 1 are also decent smartphones for their prices.
