Elephone U Pro Review – Curved Edges are Not Enough

The Elephone U Pro is their most ambitious phone to date, but their inexperience at designing and refining flagships shows clearly in this valiant but half baked attempt.

Elephone U Pro Review

For a smaller manufacturer like Elephone, this is the flagship of flagships. A Snapdragon 660 processor, curved AMOLED display, NFC and wireless charging, this phone promises the world, and the general public (including me) were incredibly hyped about this product. However, the phone itself had a couple of issues, but even ignoring those, the list price is an incredibly hard pill to swallow. Let’s dive in depth.

Quick Note: The Elephone U Pro review has been delayed for quite a while due to software issues, and Elephone has just released an update that fixed most of them, so this review is with the latest software update provided by Elephone.

Flagship of Flagships

Elephone U Pro Specifications

Elephone U Pro Hardware

The first thing that jumps out at me is how striking this phone looks. Every single person including smartphone enthusiasts thought the “China phone guy” broke and bought an S8. From the front, the phone is almost completely identical to the Galaxy S8 down to the curved side bezels and slim top/bottom bezels.It’s markedly different on the back, with a distinct lumia Gorilla Glass 5 backing that looks nice but attracts fingerprints and dirt extremely easily, not to mention being quite slippery under certain conditions. The fingerprint sensor is located in the center of the phone and is incredibly tiny in my opinion, I would have preferred a larger sensor area instead.

The guts of the U Pro are held firmly in place by a sturdy, chromed metal band that adds some heft to the device and makes it fairly resistant to drops as long as it doesn’t fall face down or face up, which it is hugely prone to do due to the curved edges.There is no headphone jack, just a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter included. The volume and power buttons feel slightly mushy to the touch also.

While I’m not a fan of glass backed phones, this is my favourite phone by far to hold in my hand. The curved edges make it feel like a pebble designed to fit perfectly in the palm of my hand, with nary a phone coming close to this in terms of comfort. I freaked out more than once thinking I had left the phone at a restaurant because I couldn’t feel it in my pocket, so that goes to show you how compact and beautiful this phone is.The Elephone Logo on the back is probably the coolest touch to the phone itself as it lights up and pulses when you charge it and can be used as a notification light, although I seldom had the opportunity to see it in action as I almost never placed the phone face down.

Gorgeous, compact, fits like a glove

Elephone U Pro Display

When I first saw the Samsung Galaxy S8’s AMOLED display, I remarked that it looked painted on, and the AMOLED display on the Elephone U Pro comes close. Manufactured by a company called BOE, this is an incredibly beautiful looking display that combines the colour saturation abilities of an AMOLED with a curved panel to create a display that is second to none.Those are real curves by the way, not the sissy, shallow curves implemented by some Galaxy S8 wannabes and in the case of the U Pro is purely aesthetic, there is no extra (useful) functionality to the curved portion of the screen.The AMOLED display is quick to punch you in the gut with the amount of colour saturation its capable of, with almost all LCD displays looking rather pale and washed out beside it (with the exception of the Smartisan Nut Pro 2 of course). Lovely saturated colours make watching movies and TV a pleasure and the 1080p pixel density leaves little to be desired also. Maximum brightness hovering around 500 nits allows easy use in sunlight as well.

Touch sensitivity is excellent also, and the ambient display works well.

Real curves

Elephone U Pro Audio

This is the first area of the U Pro that leaves something to be desired. Speaker volume is good, able to power through most situations, however speaker quality is not up to par. The speakers sound fairly tinny with little to no bass, and I could hear some very slight distortion at maximum volume as well.
I will say that most normal, non-tech geeks will probably give the speaker quality a pass, but if you care about audio in the least, this is not the phone for you.

Elephone U Pro Battery

While battery life on this U Pro is more than acceptable, Elephone still has lots of optimizing left to do if they want to bring the battery life up to par with the current midrange Snapdragon killer, the Xiaomi Mi Note 3.

I was able to get a respectable 8 hours of screen on time consisting of fairly heavy use, including Youtube, light gaming, taking photos and social media. However, the combination of the Snapdragon 660, 3500mAh battery, and AMOLED display should yield at least 25% better battery life than what we are getting here, and the only real culprit I could nail down was the software.

Wireless charging does work also, however its obviously slower than charging using a QuickCharge 3.0 brick.

Battery’s Not Bad

Elephone U Pro Software & Performance

The one thing Elephone does right is the inclusion of Stock Android on all their phones, something they’ve never deviated from. The phone comes with Stock Android 8.0 Oreo with a slightly modified launcher that includes swipe up to access the app drawer, something I’m grateful for.

They have included a few thoughtful software additions such as pinning app shortcuts to the edges of the screen and apeing the iPhone X’s swipe up to go home gestures, except modified to conform to Android’s usual 3 button system. This allows the home, multitasking, and back button to be hidden, allowing for more real estate.

The fingerprint sensor is unusually slow which is most likely a software issue. It takes over 1 second to unlock the phone when you position your finger there. The face unlock does work fairly well though, I didn’t find any issues with it.Performance here is somewhat of a mixed bag. This phone can handle pretty much any game you throw at it, the Snapdragon 660 blows through anything with ease, especially at the 1080p resolution. A couple of more intense games saw tiny slowdowns when playing at highest settings (like PubG) but lowering the settings fixes that issue. Where you start seeing slowdowns is when software optimization comes into play. Swiping between home screens is fast but not blazing fast, launching and switching between apps is fast enough but I’ve definitely seen better on other phones like the Smartisan Nut Pro 2 and the Xiaomi Mi Note 3, the software is definitely holding this phone back.In a word, the software here is not polished to a T, and Elephone has lots of work ahead of them to make this a great device.

Elephone U Pro Connectivity

This is the one area which really surprised me (negatively). Elephone has chosen to include the bare minimum network bands required on this phone, something even the cheapest $100 phones outclass in terms of the number of network bands enabled.
The inclusion of a paltry WCDMA 900/2100 ensures the entire North America will not get any 3G connectivity on ANY carrier. The LTE bands included are 1/3/5/7/20, which does allow the phone to work on Rogers ONLY in Canada, but will not get LTE on ANY American carriers.
It does fully support European bands so European residents need not worry.

WiFi reception is quite stellar on this device as is Bluetooth connectivity and range, with GPS showing a fairly strong performance, fast locks and no jumping around.

NFC does work and can be used with Android Pay.

Elephone U Pro Camera

Elephone hyped up their cameras with great gusto, boasting great hardware AND great software by cooperating with a company called Arcsoft.In good lighting conditions, you can take very good photos. Lots of detail, very saturated and deep colours and good dynamic range. I found shutter speed to be very quick, however the slow software caused the overall picture taking speed of the phone to be somewhat average.The bokeh mode here separates the foreground from the background to give your image more punch, and this mode works quite well. It does a decent job separating the fore from the background with some minor errors as it will occasionally blur out part of the foreground.However, photo quality leaves much to be desired in low light situations. I was surprised with the amount of noise and grain that was introduced into low light shots, as the photos looked quite bad considering the chipset, the camera components, and the software name behind it.The front facing camera is actually fairly decent, taking fine looking selfies in good lighting conditions, but the same issue comes into play when the lighting conditions are subpar.
You are capable of taking up to 4K video and there is quite a bit of detail and colour reproduction is decent, however it still falls behind phones like the Redmi 5 Plus.

Elephone U Pro Camera Gallery

Elephone U Pro Verdict

In a nutshell, the Elephone U Pro’s software is unpolished. Its lack of refinement shows in a couple of areas, namely battery efficiency, speed of use, and camera quality. The great hardware in this device is hampered greatly by the subpar software.

However, even if this phone filled all the right checkboxes, it still comes at a very high price. Starting at $439, that’s an incredibly high price to pay for the phone you’re getting. The Xiaomi Mi Note 3 is basically an ugly version of this phone with better software to boot; and can be found for as little as $300. The Smartisan Nut Pro 2 can be described as the less attractive but still very attractive cousin to the Elephone U Pro and can be found for $330. The major differentiating factors between the Elephone U Pro and its competitors is the curved AMOLED display and stock Android.Is the AMOLED display worth a $100-150 premium over the other competitors? Not to me, I wouldn’t pay that much money for a curved AMOLED display, not to mention the unpolished software hinders the Elephone U Pro from reaching its full potential (by far).

All in all, I do not recommend this phone in its current state, and even if the phone’s software could be fixed so the hardware could be used to its full potential, I still do not recommend it because the price to performance ratio is just not there. I would recommend you check out our Smartisan Nut Pro 2 and Xiaomi Mi Note 3 reviews as those phones (on sale) represent the price/performance pinnacle of Chinese midrange devices.

Valiant Effort by Elephone

Elephone U Pro Gallery

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