Micromax Yu Yureka Review: Is this the Right Smartphone for You?

Yureka is the debut smartphone of Yu, Indian smartphone manufacturer Micromax's sister brand. Once unveiled, the Yureka received huge acclamation from the users and was sold out like hot cakes in India. The exclusive seller of Yureka, Amazon India, is selling the smartphone through flash sales, which create an artificial demand in the market and hence always tops on the news.

Available for just ₹8,999, Yureka offers some great specifications on board and runs on the most critically acclaimed Android ROM, CyanogenMod. But is it really worth buying? Let's have a look.

Design & Built

Comes packed in a beautiful eco-friendly square brown box with a Yu logo over it, the Yureka smartphone has been accompanied with hardcopy manuals, charger and earphone. However, we didn't understand the logic behind pairing white charger and earphone with a grey-coloured handset.

Measuring 154.8x78mm the Yu Yureka is 8.8mm thick and weighs 155g. Though it fits nicely into one's hand, the all-plastic smartphone feels comfortable to hold. The matte finish on the back, which the manufacturer named as "Moonstone Grey" is finger print-and-smudge proof.

The cyan coloured YU logo has been placed at the centre back below the rear camera and the flash. The speaker grille has been placed at the bottom. The power/lock button has been housed on the right edge while the volume rocker sits on the left edge. The 3.5mm audio out port has been housed at the top and the micro USB port at the bottom. The Yureka would appeal those who are fond of sobre colours while others may find it a little boring.

Display

Yureka boasts a 5.5-inch IPS display with a pixel resolution of 720x1280 at 267 PPI, identical with the biggest competitor Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G. Unfortunately, the Yureka screen looks a bit unimpressive for the lower pixel density rate. The colours on the screen also feel a little over-saturated. But the display features decent viewing angle and remains readable under direct sunlight.

For added protection, Yu has combined Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection and oleophobic coating over the display.

CyanogenMod

The key feature of Yu Yureka is it's CyanogenMod-based Android Operating system. The Cyanogen-made OS features a lot of customisation and power features over the regular Google Android built. But again it depends on the user's preference, as some might feel the CyanogenMod OS too simple and tricky.

The customised Cyanogen OS features the usual slide lock screen, Google Now on the home screen and app launcher navigation. The interface allows you to change the lock screen, status bar, notification panel and more. The Cyanogenmod OS also keeps updating the OS very frequently and YU has rolled out an OTA update already.

Based on Android Kitkat 4.4, the Cyanogenmod built features several utility apps including file manager, auto cloud backup gallery, theme store and a fully fledged app named AudioFX for tuning the audio-out quality.

Performance

Powered by an Octa-Core Snapdragon 615 SoC, the Yureka couples 2GB of RAM memory and 16 GB of onboard memory. The device further allows increasing the memory up to 32GB by inserting a micro SD card.

The combination of hardware made Yureka a power performer among tasks. In real life usage, we didn't notice any lags while executing multiple apps, clicking images, navigating across multiple web pages and playing high resolution games. The touch response of the Yureka is decent and call reception quality was good too.

The device did well in the synthetic benchmarking test too, by achieving 17,586 in the Quadrant standard benchmarking test. It also managed well by scoring 32138 in the AnTuTu benchmarking test.

The bundled earphone is loud enough and a subtle performer across genres. The earphone achieves decent audio quality across ranges. However, the supplied charger feels cheap for the annoying bright LED and cheap quality make. The charger bundled in our review box also took around four-and-a-half hours to fully charge the phone.

Camera & Battery

Yureka packs a 13mp rear camera with LED flash and a 5mp front camera. The resulting shots in ambient light appeared nice with ample amount of details. Both the camera manages to achieve decent quality images with good colour presence. The camera also features a slow-mo video capturing with 60 frames per second.

Yureka packs the CyanogenMod camera app with a simple intuitive interface with sliding controls. The main screen is simple with some basic controls feels perfect for the point and shoot clickers.

However, the biggest let-down of the Yureka smartphone is its battery. Featuring a 2,500 mAh battery the phone lasts around half a day which is not very promising. Micromax may have featured such a low-powered battery for keeping the price low. The battery is removable hence you can buy a spare battery for hot swapping when required.

Wrapping Up

Available at ₹8,999, the Yureka competes with Xiaomi's Redmi Note 4G, ASUS Xenfone 5 and recently unveiled Lava Iris X8. Though Lenovo A6000 is a 4G phone, it's not a key competitor to Yureka, but boasts as the cheapest 4G smartphone available till date.

The Yu Yureka offers a great price-to-specification ratio, but has some drawbacks too. The average screen resolution, built quality and poor battery speaks against it while the highly touted CyanogenMod OS and 4G connectivity makes it a decent buy.