Yu, a company floated by Micromax to take on the Xiaomi and others, launched its fourth phone - Yunique -- on Tuesday evening. Sporting a price tag of just Rs.4,999, this also happens to be the cheapest Yu phone launched so far. Yu and Snapdeal, which would sell this phone, said that the idea behind the Yunique was to come up with a phone that was suitable for people still using feature phones. Hence it needed to be compact, easy to use and, most significantly, affordable enough to entice people still using their old Nokia phones because they didn't want to spend Rs.15,000 on getting a smartphone.
Yu is definitely not alone in going down this route. Other companies - including Yu's parent firm Micromax -- too have come up with affordable phones, but from the first impressions it seems that Yunique could be, well, unique in what it offers
The build quality too is good. In fact, we will say that it feels better in hand compared to the Yuphoria, which uses a metal frame. Due to this metal frame, we have noticed that there is some gap where the plastic back cover meets metal in the Yuphoria. The Yunique, however, has an all plastic body and the back cover snugly grips the phone's edges, and give the impression that this is a devices that has been put together well. The back cover also has a soft rubbery coating, which looks better than the glossy finish that phones in this price bracket sport. The rubbery finish, we feel, will also help hide oil smudges relatively better.
The only complaint, as far as the design and finish that we noticed during our short meeting with Yunique, relates to the buttons. They have slightly sharp edges, that give the impression of poor workmanship.
Talking of the screen, we find the that HD resolution (720p) of Yunique screen makes it fairly sharp. The colours, however, look slightly washed out and not as punchy as what we see on a phone like the Moto E (first gen), which also sells for less than Rs.5,000. However, the resolution of the Moto E screen is poor and overall, we feel that the Yunique has a better screen. But the screen is one aspect we will have more to say about in our review.
The Yunique has fairly potent hardware for its price. In our brief use, we found the device to be responsive and fairly fast. The Snapdragon 410 processor and 1GB RAM means it is likely to handle tasks like web browsing, chatting and social media use etc with ease. We noticed some occasional lag while switching between apps or browsing through image gallery but it wasn't anything that would cause concern to users. In fact, the Yunique feels faster than many phones that cost more than Rs.10,000 or even more.
The device has 8GB internal storage. It has a 8-megapixel rear camera and 2-megapixel front camera. We will have more to say about the camera performance of this phone later.
Once of the reasons why we feel that Yunique could be a game changer is its software. It runs an almost unmodified version of Android Lollipop, something which is a rare sight. The Android Lollipop, in its vanilla avatar is clean, usable and aesthetically pleasing. We prefer our Android vanilla and Yunique gives us exactly that.
There is no doubt that the Yunique, just like other Yu devices, is a phone that attempts to shake up the market. From first impressions, we can say that it sure has lots of potential. But we are going to spend some more time with it before we can emphatically say that this is the phone to buy if you have a budget of less than Rs.5,000.
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