Oukitel U20 Plus review: Reliable mid-range camera phone

Like Xiaomi, Huawei, Vivo and Oppo, another Chinese smartphone maker — Oukitel — is trying a make a mark in the highly competitive smartphone market and in its pursuit to climb to the top, has launched a mid-range camera phone dubbed as U20 Plus.

We have been using the Oukitel U20 Plus for close to two weeks and here's our take on the device's performance.

Design and build quality:

Design wise, Oukitel U20 Plus comes with a 5.5-inch full HD display having curved corners. The device's back looks strikingly identical to the iPhone 7 Plus. The dual camera with LED flash is uncanny, but the placement of the fingerprint sensor in the middle gives it away that it's not the iPhone 7 Plus.

As far as build quality is concerned, Oukitel U20 Plus comes with full metallic cover on the back. The quality of the metal used is very good and shiny, which exudes a premium feelnot just with the looks and also feels sturdy when held in hand.

Only qualm we faced was that the U20 Plus does not feature back-lit buttons (recents, home and back) in the front panel. It is really hard to use the phone, especially to switch between apps in the dark conditions.

Performance:

Oukitel U20 Plus houses 1.5GHz MediaTek (MT6737T) quad-core processor backed by 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage.

Compared to rivals, Qukitel's phone is short of horsepower. Having said that, it performed quite well during our tests. It showed no signs of lag while launching an app, switching between multiple applications and playing popular games such as Temple Run and Angry Bird. But, it starts slowing down when we tried playing graphics-rich games like Asphalt 8 and also during photo-taking session, the camera app used to abruptly stop. On the second try, it used to work without any issues.

In the AnTuTu 3D benchmark test, it scored 40,535 points. And, on the Geekbench 4.0, it managed to score 653 and 1797 points in terms of single-core and multi-core tests.

Camera:

The highlight of Oukitel U20 Plus is its camera and during the trials, it did live up to its reputation. The twin-camera, which looks a lot like the iPhone 7 Plus, takes some stunning images not only in bright sunny conditions, but also during twilight zone.

At night too, it took some quality pictures with the flash's support.

It boasts 13MP (with Sony IMX135 sensor) primary camera and a 0.3MP secondary snapper, which assists in taking information of the scene such as distance, depth and light.

With such hardware, the user can create pictures with Bokeh effect. Once the image is taken, the users can shift the focus of the subjects, or blur the back ground in the frame to bringing out the popular Bokeh effect feature seen in Apple iPhone 7 Plus.

On the front, it houses a 5MP camera, which took decent quality selfies.

Battery:

Oukitel U20 Plus packs a pretty big 3,300mAh battery and during our tests, it managed to keep the phone awake for entire day under mixed usage, which included voice and WhatApp video calling and web browsing.

But, it drained really fast while we played games and used camera. This is not a big deal, considering the fact that other phones exhibit the same behaviour under the aforementioned conditions.

Mobile user-interface:

Like other Chinese brands, Oukitel U20 Plus comes with heavily customised UI, which is a real pain to navigate through the phone for the first-time users and pure Android enthusiasts (yours truly too).

Having said that, this aspect of the phone is very subjective, as some people tend to like customisation in smartphones [For instance, there is a huge following for Xiaomi MIUI interface].

As far as fingerprint sensor is concerned, it impressed us a lot. It was quick in recognising the finger impression and unlock the screen.

Verdict:

All-in-all, Oukitel U20 Plus is good a phone for its asking price (less than 11,000 on e-Bay India), but it has go lot of competition from its Chinese peers, especially Xiaomi, Huawei and Lenovo. They offer phones with similar hardware if not better at the same price range.

If the phone is marketed properly, Oukitel's U20 Plus will definitely fly off the shelves fast.

Pros:

• Good camera
• long battery life
• praise worthy build quality

Cons:

• No back-lit buttons on the display
• Highly customized UI (but, its subjective to individual tastes)