UMiDIGI One Pro review: “twilight” beauty with decent pricing

UMIDIGI is once again back in Gizchina HQ, with yet another notched Android smartphone, cloned to the max – but with a VERY decent price and typical specifications! Its not so special name is UMIDIGI One Pro and as you can easily understand, it tries to borrow things (names, specs, design) from other phones (iPhone X, Huawei P20 Pro, Honor etc) but manages to retain its low-end character combined with a very aggressive price that’s just 169$ at the time of this presentation.

Compared with smartphones of any other brands present in the market, UMiDIGI One Pro is a beautiful, affordable smartphone and comes with really notable features that most of you might even find interesting. 😉

Enter the UMiDIGI One Pro, the latest in the onslaught of UMiDiGi devices, this time coming in a beautiful Twilight color that will surely blow your mind!

UMiDIGI One Pro Review

In terms of overall appearance, body build and form, the UMiDIGI One Pro is your typical Huawei/Honor device – packed with pure Android and lower end specs. Actually, it’s a decent low to mid range model, that excels in design and it’s just average in terms of performance in everyday use. It weighs approximately 190 gr. (despite the fact that it hosts a typical 3250 mAh battery) and its size is 148 x 71,4 x 8,3 mm. This means that it’s really thin, relatively lightweight and very easy to use with one hand – if anyone’s interested.

The UMiDIGI One Pro has its main dual camera on the rear but it saves a special place for its fingerprint sensor, just inside the On/Off button that sits at the right side of the device!

Yes, it has borrowed the sensor placement that Sony first established in most of their smartphones, and in my eyes, that’s a good decision. The device’s frontal is almost empty apart from the notorious notch that sits at the top of the display. Apart from this, there’s just the screen, a selfie camera (with low-end FaceID-like features) and the earpiece of course.

UMiDIGI One Pro Specifications

• Display: 5.86 inch, 1520 x 720 Pixel Screen
  
• CPU: MT6763 Octa Core 2.0GHz
  
• System: Android 8.1
  
• RAM + ROM: 4GB RAM + 64GB ROM
  
• Camera: 12.0MP + 5.0MP rear camera + 16.0MP front camera
  
• Sensor: Proximity Sensor, E-compass, Gravity Sensor, Face ID, Light Sensor, Fingerprint Sensor, Gyroscope, NFC
  
• SIM Card: Nano SIM card + Nano SIM card / TF card
  
• Feature: GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS
  
• Bluetooth:4.2
• Networks: GSM: B2 / B3 / B5 / B8, CDMA BC0 / BC1 – WCDMA: B1 / 2 / 4 / 5 / 8, TD-SCDMA: B34 / 39 – FDD-LTE: B1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 7 / 8 / 12 / 13 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 25 / 26 / 28A / 28B, TDD-LTE: B34 / 38 / 39 / 40 / 41

Big thanks to UMiDiGi for providing this review unit. You can buy one here 🙂

UMiDIGI One Pro Build Quality

The screen is a 5.86-inches IPS panel, with a resolution of 1520 x 720 pixels. The display comes with 2.5D curved glass with a typical pixel density, equipped with Corning’s Gorilla Glass system for screen protection.

The impressive “Twilight” colour of this phone really sold me. I pride myself on being immune to colour choice, but man has this purple-blue-green-ish really sold me. Let’s ignore the eye catching color for a moment, the build quality here is good but… not excellent.

Surely it has improved from the days of the notorious UMI Super, but still it feels plastic some times – and this isn’t at all bad, for a phone at this price range. In any case, the phone is fairly easy to hold, but not as easy as a five-incher, the thinness does make it feel very small though.

The body is made out of plastic and metal, along with a special cover at the back that resembles glass (but it’s not). Its build quality is good as I said before but as with every phone that uses a glossy finish it gets easily smudged and you may end up polishing it every couple of minutes with a small cloth :p

UMiDIGI One Pro Display

The One Pro comes with a capacitive IPS display with typical maximum brightness that could make it hard to use only under direct sunlight. As we mentioned earlier, the screen size is 5.86 inches and has a resolution of 720 x 1520 pixels, providing a 19:9 aspect ratio and a staggering 90% screen/body ratio -> that’s according to the manufacturer.

This display does have a slightly blue/purple tint that is almost unnoticeable in real life but does show quite noticeably on camera. Max brightness tops out around 400 nits which is quite respectable for such a panel, and is also relatively viewable under direct sunlight. Touch sensitivity is excellent and the 19:9 aspect ratio allows for excellent one hand use, typical of that of a 5.2 inch smartphone!

UMiDIGI One Pro Battery

The combination of the built-in 3250mAh battery, IPS display, and the Helio P23 (MTK6763) SoC should provide average battery life. And while that holds mostly true, I believe its battery life could definitely be better. I managed to get approximately 5 hours of screen on time with ease, ending the day with 18% left. This comes after about 2 hours of YouTube, about an hour of gaming, 1,5 hours of local video playback, and about 3 hours of Bluetooth music in addition to all the miscellaneous items I performed such as Whatsapp, texting, FaceBook etc.

The one area where UMiDiGi has to improve on is the standby battery drain. I was getting a guaranteed 1% battery drain every hour, with it jumping up to 1.5% sometimes. This has to be solved if possible through software. UMIDIGI says that the One Pro supports wireless charging and – it does, but with certain hickups: it has to be placed firmly on the OEM wireless charging pad and the charging rate is not that fast. However for a price of 169$ one could forget about these, plug a USB Type-C cable and get on with his life 😉

UMiDIGI One Pro Software

We have Android 8.1 Oreo running inside the phone, and I must say that UMiDiGi’s software optimization has taken a step up again over the older models, with this phone feeling even smoother when moving between home screens, going into settings etc.

Launching lots of apps at the same time, on the other hand, is a more ponderous process with the Helio P23 chipset struggling (a bit) to keep up with our needs, with 4GB of RAM being all this phone needs. Not an overkill (like having 6GB), but also not 3GB (which is not enough anymore).

The Helio P23 doesn’t affect gaming, it’s able to play all the games at 720p without issue, Modern combat, Asphalt, lighter games such as Super Mario Run ran without a hitch, even when I was recording the screen at the same time. The phone gets warm on its back side but never gets burning hot.

I also ran a malware scan and didn’t find anything. The fingerprint sensor is NOT that accurate, so you will have to train it 2-3 times more in order for it to get to “know” you. Let’s say we had an average of 80% success in identifying my thumb – which could be better I guess.

UMiDIGI One Pro Connectivity

Reception on this phone is great. The device comes with full 4G support (LFDD-LTE: B1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 7 / 8 / 12 / 13 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 25 / 26 / 28A / 28B, TDD-LTE: B34 / 38 / 39 / 40 / 41), it offers very good connectivity inside large cities, with no dropped calls or problems during communication.

WiFi speeds are great, an 800MB file takes 4 minutes (on fast WiFi that is), and Bluetooth range is good also. I used the GPS to navigate to work, and it was fairly accurate and fast. No problems with Google Maps, or Sygic navigation 🙂 Well done UMIDIGI on this.

UMiDIGI One Pro Camera

The camera is a welcomed surprise when using it in day mode! It’s photos offer good detail levels and it can be relatively easy to shoot good photos – as you keep your phone relatively still! Don’t worry the phone snaps photos pretty quickly so you don’t have to be a statue forever.

Colour reproduction ranges from good to great, with colour sometimes being rather average and showing great saturation and vividness other times. HDR mode, on the other hand, should be left disabled at all times, well almost all times. The HDR mode is way too aggressive, trying to equalize “bright” and “dark” spots when they aren’t that far apart in the first place. You have to leave it off unless there are extremely obvious bright and dark spots, e.g. taking a picture of the sun. In those cases, the aggressive HDR does its job well.

Moving on to Bokeh mode, which I see more and more as a gimmick, it adds Bokeh in a very unnatural circle, and not only that the overall quality of the photo is lowered as well. There is also a pro photo mode that works quite well and uses very convenient sliders to change the camera settings. The front facing camera is rather typical also.

Now for the video. The camera app seems to lag behind real life by about ½ a second. Now a camera lagging behind real life slightly is normal, but ½ a second is reserved for low-end cameras, not in a $169 device. In addition, the video recording is weirdly laggy, almost like the video is recording normally for a second, then slow for the next.

Overall, these items make for an average video experience, and is really a downside to this phone.

UMiDIGI One Pro Verdict

Hands down, this is a very beautiful – and affordable mid-ranger in the market. UMIDIGI shows signs of improvement with every device they launch: first they try to change their support, then they copy the good features of high end phones and combine them with a pure Android 8.1 Oreo UI that surely delivers.

Nope I am not certain that you will get a lot of OTA updates with this device. I got TWO wireless OTA updates during the 10 days I had it in my hands, but they brought bug fixes and small performance improvements. I really hope this phone gets Android 9.0 Pie – UMIDIGI has to surprise us and make a turn towards decent after sales support. This will surely help them improve their sales even more. 

This UMiDIGI One Pro at $169,99 is surely one of the phones one should pay attention to, especially if the design of a phone is high on your “plus” list. It offers typical battery life with a 3250 mAh battery, very good built quality, decent display (nothing much) and a solid chipset with 4GB of RAM for decent everyday use.

Buy UMIDIGI One Pro from their official shop

It’s surely one of these phones that should definitely be on your “to see” list, before you decide which smartphone you’ll buy next.

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