Ulefone T1 Review

Overview

Ulefone is one of the well-known Chinese smartphone brands among people who are budget-conscious and are looking for devices that offer a reasonable price/quality ratio. Along with Oukitel, UmiDiGi, Doogee, Elephone, this manufacturer has gone a long way in building a reputation and gaining experience in making smartphones. It is true to the style of offering one or more core benefits per model while maintaining a solid build and steady mid-range level in terms of specifications. All this usually arrives in a neat package with a price that's easy to swallow. Ulefone T1 is only just beginning to hit the market and is already gaining a steady interest from people who are looking for an affordable, good looking, well-made and well-performing smartphone. Our 10-page in-depth review of this model will test all this and see whether it lives up to expectations.

Specifications

Ulefone T1 has a CNC crafted metal unibody made of aluminium alloy and graced by a 5.5-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels. The latter is protected by a 2.5D curved Corning Gorilla Glass 3 with oleophobic coating. The display panel is said to cover 96% of the NTSC colour space and to have 1400:1 static contrast ratio. Under the metal hood, a 3680 mAh Li-Polymer battery sits. It supports MediaTek Pump Express plus 2.0 and arrives with a 9V/2A fast charger. The accumulator promises up to 450 hours of standby time. Hardware-wise, the model is based on a MediaTek Helio P25 (MT6757CD) system-on-chip, developed on the 16nm process. It packs 4x 2.6GHz Cortex-A53 CPU cores and another quadruplet of those but clocked at 1.6GHz. The graphics department is managed by a 900MHz dual-core Mali-T880 GPU. The LPDDR4 and built-in memory are quite generous and measure 6GB and 64GB, respectively. The latter can be expanded with up to 256GB. The model features a 6-axis gyroscope for VR and a capacitive fingerprint sensor with 360-degree recognition, 0.1s unlock time and capability of storing up to 5 IDs. The camera department includes two rear shooters - a 16MP Samsung S5K3P3 one with a 5-element lens, f/2.0 aperture and a 5MP snapper. The setup is aided by phase-detection AF and a two-tone quad-LED flash. On the front, an 8MP OmniVision OV8856 camera sits (interpolated to 13MP). It has a 5-element lens with an f/2.0 aperture and is coupled with a selfie softlight. The audio department has not been overlooked as well. It features an independent NXP Smart PA Hi-Fi chipset (FS1601U) and an amplifier from Fourier. As long as it concerns network bands support, Ulefone T1 is a real worldwide smartphone. It supports a total of 25 network bands, including FDD and TDD-LTE ones. The model's connectivity options include dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.1. GPS and GLONASS are supported and there's a USB Type-C port with OTG on board. The device runs on Android 7.0 Nougat. Here's the full set of Ulefone T1 specifications.

What's in the box

Ulefone T1 is placed inside a stylish, flat, rectangular box. The black lid has the brand and model name on it written in silver. The body of the box is red for a nice contrast and in order to access it, you have to pull it out. The device is positioned in the top level compartment. It is carefully packaged and has a pre-applied screen protector. Below the smartphone, in separate compartments, you will see a USB Type-C cable, a Micro-USB to Type-C adapter, a 5V/2A; 7V/2A; 9V/2A; 12V/1.5A fast charger, and an envelope that contains a leather case for the back, a screen protector, small phone stand that looks like a key holder, a SIM tray pin, warranty card and a user manual.