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.
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
Processor | Snapdragon 660 Octacore Processor |
Display | 5.99” 2160×1080 AMOLED Display |
RAM | 4/6GB |
Storage | 64/128GB eMMC |
Operating System | Android 8.0 Oreo |
Cameras | 13MP/13MP Rear Cameras, 8MP Front |
Battery | 3,500mAh |
Physical Dimensions | 15.40 cm x 7.25 cm x 0.84 cm, 166g |
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.
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.
Gorgeous, compact, fits like a glove
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.
Touch sensitivity is excellent also, and the ambient display works well.
Real curves
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.
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
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.
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.
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 hyped up their cameras with great gusto, boasting great hardware AND great software by cooperating with a company called Arcsoft.
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.
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.
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
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