Ulefone Be Touch might be one of the most well known Chinese phones at the moment, right alongside the Elephone P7000. The Be Touch is Ulefone most powerful phone ever, and it also happens to have a design which is quite pleasing to the eye, despite being heavily inspired by another phone, the one and only iPhone 6.
Be Touch it’s a phone made with some high-quality material, along with a fingerprint sensor which works if you press it. The high-quality chassis, the curved front glass and the overall ‘feel’ of the phone will give you a sense of holding a very well made piece of kit when the phone is in your hand.
Ulefone Be Touch Design
Design of the Be Touch is a bit of everything, with, as mentioned earlier, a lot of the iPhone 6. Another phone that the Be Touch might remind you of is the Meizu MX4; this one’s found more impostors than Meizu bosses would’ve ever imagined.
The front is covered entirely in 2.5D curved Gorilla Glass. This is one of the favourite aspects of the phone for us. Up until now, it used to be pretty easy to tell between a Chinese phone and phone from a big mainstream company, but with OEMs like Ulefone including things like 2.5D curved glass, machine-drilled speaker holes, etc., it is virtually impossible now.
You’ll find a 5 MP front camera right on the top left, accompanied by the front LED flash. Next to it sits the earpiece, and then the usual suite of sensors.
Built
There’s a black stripe of bezel right below the 5.5-inch screen. This is rather sad more than anything else because if not for that, the Be Touch would’ve perhaps been the chosen phone for a lot of people. Speaking of bezels, the very impressive Ecoo E04 Aurora had something similar; we hope companies find a way to deal with this in the coming months. Especially on 5.5-inch phones, where there’s more space to play around with things.
Below the screen, the menu, home, and back keys sit in respective order. It must be said that the home button is nice to touch and feels and looks extremely high quality.
To achieve the iPhone impostor look, the Be Touch has its own metallic ring around the home button.
Design Elements
A robust-looking metal frame sits around the edges of the phone, with precise cut-outs for jacks and ports, along with 6 machine-drilled holes at the bottom edge for the speaker. Between this metal frame and the front glass, there’s a barely noticeable plastic lip which is raised ever so slightly to ensure drops and falls don’t impact the glass directly.
Power and volume keys can be found on the left edge. Again, these are put together in a very, very impressive fashion; clicks are registered in a very organized manner with great feedback. However, one issue we have with the power button is its positioning; it is put way too high for a 5.5-inch phone. Swapping the power and volume keys would make for a delightful position for the power button, right where your left thumb would sit. Because of the current arrangement, you’ll either have to switch positions after unlocking the phone or use the home button each time, the latter would make for a majority, we believe, especially if you’re going to use the fingerprint unlock feature.
The rear cover is flexible and looks to be made out of good quality plastic. It can be a little cumbersome to pry it out, but then that’s something we like, after all, you don’t want it to come off or anything after every drop.
Inside, there’s a 2550mAh battery and SIM card tray along with a microSD card.
Ulefone Be Touch Camera
The rear is also where the 13 MP IMX214 camera and single LED flash are. The flash cut-out is made to look like there’s dual-LED flash, whereas there’s just one LED module.
The camera sensor has a nice metallic ring that surrounds it, something which yet again adds to the build aspect of this phone. Another reminder of how well Ulefone has put together this handset!
Under the hood of Ulefone Be Touch, you will find a powerful MediaTek MT6752 64-bit octa-core processor, 3GB of RAM and has a 5.5-inch screen. Unfortunately, the screen is only a 1280 x 720p unit.
Other than that, the smartphone has 16GB of onboard storage, a 13 MP primary camera and a 5 MP front camera with LED flash. The battery is a 2550mAh cell, which does sound a little inadequate for the screen size but the fact that it is only a 720p panel helps here. Also, something to be kept in mind is that the phone ships with stock Android, v5.0 Lollipop.
The 5.5-inch 720p screen won’t blow you away with its colour and sharpness. Instead, you’ll be a little surprised by the fact that it is, in fact, a little pale in front of the competition. Also, one of the best features that come along with the MT6752, MiraVision, seems to be missing from the Lollipop ROM. In the past, a lot of MT6752 and MT6732 phones have benefited from MiraVision’s suite of features, especially dynamic contrast. Here’s hoping that an update soon brings MiraVision to the Lollipop ROM of the Be Touch!
Picture Quality
The 13 MP camera, which according to the makers is a Sony IMX214 sensor, doesn’t seem to have been implemented too well. The pictures have a slight bit of darkness to them, and the dynamic contrast doesn’t seem to be the best. That is, with a bright and dark element in the single frame, the Be Touch doesn’t do exceedingly well. One counter to that would be HDR mode, but even that doesn’t help too much.
Conclusion
As is very clear from what you’ve read, we’re surprised with the build quality that the Be Touch has on offer. Performance too is quite remarkable, but the ROM needs a lot of polishing to extract whatever the MediaTek MT6752 has on offer. It does sometimes seem like the ROM is a beta release than a full public release.
The phone has only started shipping now, so expect a lot of improvements on the ROM front. Ulefone have proven themselves with the right amount of firmware updates to their phones, and we hope to see similar treatment being given to the Be Touch also.
At this point, it wouldn’t be cent per cent accurate to call the Be Touch a flagship for 2015. But it does come close.
