Ulefone Metal Review

We have reviewed several Ulefone smartphones already such as the Ulefone Vienna and the Ulefone Future. It is obvious that the company tries to make entry-level and mid-range devices, which are very reasonably priced, and has managed to win a fair share of the users' love around the world. Each model has a core asset, which makes it attractive to a certain group in the smartphone market, and is coupled with very good build and classic design. Ulefone Metal is no exception, so follow us on this short journey of getting acquainted with the model. Who knows, it might turn out to be your next smartphone.

Specifications

As expected, Ulefone Metal has a metal body crafted by using the CNC process with additional treatments for fine-tuning and finishing. It is graced by a grade-A 5-inch display that packs an IPS panel by Sharp with an HD resolution (720 x 1280). The screen is protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and has a 2.5D curved top glass layer. Under the device's hood ticks a MediaTek MT6753 system-on-chip. It sports eight Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.3GHz and a tri-core ARM Mali-T720 MP3 GPU clocked at 450 MHz. Their performance is backed by 3GB of single-channel, LPDDR3 RAM clocked at 800MHz. The built-in memory measures 16GB and can be expanded with up to 128GB. You'll find several sensors on board such as proximity, light, accelerometer, compass, Hall sensor and a fingerprint one. The latter is placed on the back and is capable of unlocking the device in 0.2 seconds. The model supports 2G GSM, 3G WCDMA and 4G LTE Cat. 4 networks. The rest of its connectivity options includes Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi Hotspot, Bluetooth 4.0, USB OTG, GPS and Glonass. The rear camera boasts an 8MP Sony IMX149 Exmor sensor coupled with a 5-element lens and an f/2.0 aperture, with the images being interpolated to 13MP. The front-facing shooter has a 1.3MP OmniVision OV9762 sensor and the images are interpolated to 5MP. The lights are kept on by a 3050 mAh Sony battery, which is non-removable. For the full list of Ulefone Metal specifications you can check the model's page.

What's in the box

Ulefone Metal is packaged in a rectangular black box with the Metal logo written on top with silver letters. Inside, in the top level compartment is the smartphone with a pre-applied screen protector besides all the standard packaging and below it you'll see the battery charger, USB cable, pin for the SIM tray, warranty card and user manual. Ulefone has created a set of accessories especially for this model, which are, indeed, included in the package. The first one is a tempered glass protector for the screen, which has a 9H Mohs hardness on the 10H Mohs scale. It is completely transparent and is made to fit the 2.5D curved top glass layer of the display. The protector filters the blue light from the screen and has an oleophobic coating. It comes with a cleaning cloth, dust absorber, guide sticker and spirit so you can apply it easily yourself. The second accessory is a flip case made of high quality PU material with a rubbery diamond texture. It is available in black and white colors. We got the black one as the device is black itself.

Design, build and controls

The first impression, immediately after taking the Ulefone Metal out of the box, is that it is a very stylish device. The handset has a metal body made by using CNC (computer numerical control) process for top precision and grit blasting for fine texture, followed by surface polishing for delicate finish. The caps for the antenna areas are plastic. The back is curved towards the vertical edges in such a way as to create a visual thickness of 6 mm, while the actual one measures 9.35 mm. Indeed, the smartphone looks thinner than it actually is. The rear edges are chamfered, so are the front ones, but they are microscopic and almost fully blend with the edges of the display glass. According to Ulefone, 71 mm is the "golden width for one-handed operation". We cannot say anything about that, but for sure in terms of width, the Metal is one of the most compact smartphones in the 5-inch size class, which coupled with the curved back design guarantees a comfortable grip and one-handed operation. The height of the model - 143 mm - is average for the size class. The same is with the weight of 155 grams - typical for a smartphone with a 5-inch display, 3000+ mAh battery and a metal body. We do, however, feel that the device could be made even more compact, because when you switch on the display, you will definitely notice the very thick bezels on both sides and the large free area above and below it. Ulefone Metal is available in three stylish colors: black, gray and silver. The first two have a corresponding dark front, while the silver variant has a white front. We're reviewing a black unit. As long as it concerns the build, we must say that the model, just like all other Ulefone devices we have reviewed, is very well-made. The overall look is very balanced and elegant, and if you delve into the design details, you'll see that they all are meticulously crafted. The front of the device is taken up by the display with a capacitive navigation bar below it and the light/proximity sensor, earpiece and front camera above it. The 2.5D curved top glass layer does provide smooth touch experience as it gradually merges with the chamfered front edges of the frame. The navigation bar consists of a button that opens up the Widgets menu, a home button and a back one. It cannot be edited in any way. The back of the device is where you'll see the primary camera, LED flash and fingerprint sensor, which are vertically centered in that order, followed by the Ulefone logo. At the back's lower end a rectangular hole for a single speaker is placed. Having a speaker on the back is not a good idea as the sound will definitely be hindered, but at least at the two ends there are tiny "legs", so the speaker does not get fully covered when the device lies on its back. On the left hand side of the model is where you'll find the hybrid, dual-SIM card tray, whose cover is shaped in such a way as to blend with the curved edge and the frame at one and the same time. On the right hand side two separate buttons for volume up and down are placed along with the power button. All three are metal too, provide good response and protrude only slightly. The power button has a different polish in concentric circles, so it is easily recognizable. The top frame of the handset is where the 3.5 mm jack is located, while the bottom one houses a USB 2.0 port and a microphone hole. After the photographs below you can check a video for the Ulefone Metal in the factory.

Display

Ulefone Metal is equipped with a 5-inch display, made by Sharp. It has an on-cell OGS IPS panel with an HD resolution (720 x 1280). One-glass solution panels with on-cell technology usually have a layer of touch-sensitive electrodes placed directly on the glass layer of the LCD panel. It is then covered with a thin insulating layer and a second layer of electrodes is added after that. All this is covered with a polarizing layer followed by a cover glass. In their blog, the guys from Ulefone have explicitly stated that though limited in resolution (according to current market trends), the model's display is a grade-A one. They have explained that one and the same panel is graded from A to D, A being the top level, according to the panel's quality. Metal's display has been chosen to have an equal amount of brightness for each pixel and neutral, true-to-life colors. In addition, the backlight is chosen to provide stable light emitting frequency, so the refresh rate cannot be sensed. The screen is protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and has a 2.5D curved top glass layer. Ulefone Metal's display has a classic striped matrix for its panel. In terms of color preservation the viewing angles are good, but actually brightness loss is very high when you look at the screen from aside. According to the CIE diagram, the device covers very closely the sRGB color space with only slight deviations in the peak green, blue and red areas. The display has a normal peak brightness of 332 cd/sq.m. and the white luminance values drop almost proportionally with the black luminance values, resulting in an average static contrast ratio of 1200:1 at all brightness levels. With a temperature of the white point at around 8600-8800K, the screen colors are colder than average. You can tweak the color temperature with the Live Display option from Settings > Display.

Brightness	White luminance	Black luminance	Contrast	Color temperature
100 %	331.908 cd/m2	0.276 cd/m2	1203 : 1	8603 K
75 %	257.053 cd/m2	0.215 cd/m2	1196 : 1	8766 K
50 %	179.917 cd/m2	0.150 cd/m2	1199 : 1	8697 K
25 %	99.243 cd/m2	0.082 cd/m2	1210 : 1	8718 K
0 %	17.665 cd/m2	0.015 cd/m2	1178 : 1	8779 K

OS, UI and software

Ulefone Metal arrives with nearly-stock Android 6.0 Marshmallow. You get a classic lock screen with shortcuts to the voice search and camera apps. The home screen is set to have the same wallpaper as the lock one. It has the typical row of docked apps - Dialer, Contacts, App tray, Messenger, and default Browser. The row above it includes shortcuts to Google, Gallery, Camera and Play Store. You'll see two icons next to the dot that indicates you're in the home screen. The first is a picture icon and if you swipe to the right you open a screen that leads you directly to the gallery. A second swipe to the right opens the screen with the headphones icon, meaning you get access to the music app. These two can be switched off from the Settings menu that appears next to the Wallpapers and Widgets menu. The latter can be opened either by pressing the left button from the capacitive navigation bar or by pressing and holding on an empty space on the home screen. The Notifications and Quick settings are typical for a Marshmallow device and you can edit the latter (adding, removing, changing places of icons), by activating the System UI Tuner. In case, you're not familiar with how to do it - while in the Quick Settings, press and hold the Settings icon and voilà - the System UI Tuner will appear after the About Phone option in the main Settings menu. The list with open apps can be brought up if you tap the home button, while you're in the home screen. The Volume menu is standard, so is the Power off one, which includes an option for making a screenshot as well. When you access the Settings menu for the first time you might think that it is far away from what you've used to, but it is only the main page that has undergone change in appearance. Ulefone has decided to make it more compact and colorful. The rest is all the same, actually. You get the Wireless & networks set of options first and among it you'll see the Turbo Download function. Then comes the Device group of options, from where you can tweak the Display. First, there's the Miravision function with which you can adjust the dynamic contrast. Second is the Live Display one, with which you can make the screen look colder or warmer (for more comfortable reading). Ulefone has added an option to change the font style of the UI, so if you want to have some fun with it - try it. Daydream (screen saver) and Cast screen (wireless display) are also located under Device as well as the three options for calibrating the Gsensor, Geomagnetic and Psensor. From this section you may also change the Wallpaper. However, if you open the options to do it, you'll see that many of them are duplicated. This is not a big problem or anything, but could be improved. The rest of the Device options are very standard, including the four pre-set sound modes, notifications and DND management under Sound & notification, the Apps management, Storage, Battery and Memory monitoring. The third major group of settings is called Personal. It contains the Smart Settings menu, with which you can toggle various options for interacting with the device without touching the screen such as Flip to mute calls and alarms, Smart answer (by simply placing the phone to your ear when someone calls you), Super Screenshot, and Pocket mode. There's also a group of gestures under Gesture Motion from where you can toggle various gestures such as waving a hand over the display to browse through photos in the Gallery, switch to the next song in the Music app or go to the screen adjacent to the home one. You can also opt to unlock the device in such a way. The Gesture Wakeup is a group of toggles for opening various apps simply by writing with your finger a letter on the screen, while it's switched off. For each letter you can assign a different app than the default one. For example, drawing a C (when activated as an option) will open the Camera app, but you can choose it to open the Calendar. Finally, the Smart Settings allow you to switch on and off the Float Multi-Task. This is the familiar floating dot, which provides shortcuts to the settings menu, the home screen, internal storage, gallery, calculator, app permissions, music app, and list of video files stored on the device. It also has a separate function, with which you can choose an area from the content displayed on the screen, "cut" a part of it and save it as a separate file or edit it other ways. The Personal group of settings also lets you adjust and manage the Location, Accounts, Google, Language & input, Backup & reset options. Of course, it contains the big as in any other Android M device Security section that contains the typical Screen lock, Encrypt phone, App permissions and so on. No Screen pinning though. It also contains the whole Fingerprint management section. Setting up a fingerprint ID is intuitive and quick. Once you store one, you can assign it to lock an app of your choice, to launch an app and use the sensor for releasing the camera shutter and taking photos, while in the Camera app. We found a bit odd that you cannot simply delete a fingerprint ID. The only way to remove it, is to remove the screen locking - it erases everything related to it. The fourth major set of options is the System one from where you get access to the Date & time settings, Schedule power on & off, Accessibility options, Printing services, About Phone information and System UI Tuner (when activated from the Quick Settings). With the latter you can edit the Quick Settings, show the battery percentage inside the icon on the System tray as well as choose which apps to show their icons on the system tray when they're activated or simply having notifications. The list with apps is accessed via the App tray on the home screen. Typically for a classic Marshmallow UI, all of them are alphabetically listed on one screen that can be scrolled downwards and back up. On top of the list, there's a search bar for finding apps from the list. In terms of pre-installed applications, this is as stock Android as it can get. You get the standard Dialer, Contacts, Messenger, Clock, Calendar, Calculator, Downloads, File Manager, Gallery, Camera, Music, Voice Search, Sound Recorder, Email, Browser, FM Radio, Gmail, Google, Maps, and Play Store. That's it!

Networks, calls and connectivity

Ulefone Metal has a dual-SIM card tray with hybrid functions. The first slot houses a micro SIM card, while the second can be used either with a nano-SIM or a microSD card. According to the official specifications, the device supports 2G GSM (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz), 3G W-CDMA (900, 2100 MHz), and 4G LTE Cat. 4 (800, 900, 1800, 2100, 2600 MHz) and LTE-TDD 2300 MHz (B40) networks. MTK Engineering showed that it also supports WCDMA 850 MHz. Among the other connectivity options of the device are Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi Hotspot, Bluetooth 4.0, and USB OTG. A Turbo Download function is on board as well together with a Cast screen (wireless display) one. The model works with GPS/A-GPS and Glonass, and has managed to detect many satellites from both systems with an excellent accuracy.

Performance

Ulefone Metal is the sixth device we review that is equipped with a MediaTek MT6753 chipset. It has the classic variant of this system-on-chip, which is equipped with eight 1.3GHz Cortex-A53 CPU cores and a tri-core ARM Mali-T720 MP3 GPU clocked at 450 MHz. The AnTuTu score of 37170 is close to the one of Oukitel K6000 Pro and the Elephone S3. So is the Geekbench result of 613 points - typical for devices equipped with this chipset. According to Basemark, the Uelfone Metal outperforms the Elephone S3 with only a little. The device also has the highest PCMArk test score from all six models. Just like the Elephone S3, Ulefone Metal is equipped with 3GB of single-channel, LPDDR3 RAM clocked at 800MHz and 16GB of internal memory, which can be expanded with up to 128GB. Reading and writing speeds to/from it are typically fast for that type of memory. The model also features several sensors such as proximity, light, accelerometer, compass, Hall sensor. The fingerprint sensor is placed on the back of the device under the LED flash and does unlock the device very quickly. You can store up to five fingerprint IDs and set each to lock and open a specific app. The sensor can also be used as a camera shutter.

Cameras

The Camera app of Ulefone Metal is standard. Though Ulefone has stated that there is a manual mode, there isn't such a thing actually. You may still tweak the exposure, white balance, ISO, and so on. However, they have stuck to the promise to provide an option for automatic snapping of 99 consecutive photos. The options for the rear and the front camera are one and the same, the beauty mode is available for both, too.

Primary camera

The primary camera of the Ulefone Metal sports a Sony IMX149 Exmor sensor, which is quite mysterious as there is no official information from Sony about it. Its original resolution is 8MP, but the photos are interpolated to 13 megapixels (4160 x 3120). We think that in general interpolation does harm to the photo quality, instead of doing good, but sadly this is a common practice. Actually, real Sony sensors that have the same original image resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels are the IMX145 and the IMX145-derived one. Both are 8MP sensors with the only difference being in their size. The original one is 1/3.2", while the derived one is 1/3". The sensor is combined with a 5-element lens with an f/2.2 aperture.

Secondary camera

The secondary camera of Ulefone Metal has a 1.3MP OmniVision OV9762 sensor (1376 x 960 pixels image resolution), but the images are again interpolated, this time to 5MP - 2560 x 1920 pixels.

Audio

In terms of audio quality, you can't expect much from the Ulefone Metal. The device has a single speaker placed on its back, with a sound that is very far from good. The audio test, though ending up with a Very Good overall score, actually reveals results that are even slightly worse than average devices. The model excels in frequency response, shows a good result in THD and average in THD + Noise, with the rest of the parameters being valued as Very Good. As usual, for the test we have used the RightMark Audio Analyzer software and the TASCAM US-2x2 audio interface.

Test	Value	RMAA rating
Frequency response (from 40 Hz to 15 kHz), dB	+0.11, -0.02	Excellent
Noise level, dB (A)	-93.8	Very good
Dynamic range, dB (A)	94.2	Very good
THD, %	0.010	Good
THD + Noise, dB (A)	-77	Average
IMD + Noise, %	0.013	Very good
Stereo crosstalk, dB	-81.1	Very good
IMD at 10 kHz, %	0.022	Very good
General performance		Very good

Battery

Ulefone Metal packs a 3050 mAh Li-Ion-Polymer battery that is non-removable and should provide up to 320 hours of standby time. It arrives with a standard charger with output power of 5V/1A. It took 3 hours and 4 minutes to charge the battery in full - from 0% to 100%. During the charging process we couldn't help but notice that the charger became very hot. The battery app provides you with tools for monitoring the battery performance. A Standby intelligent power saving is switched on by default. There's a Battery saver option, which is off by default, as well as the standard Schedule power on & off and Battery optimization. The PCMark Work battery life test showed a result of 6 hours and 17 minutes, which is a very good result for a device of that class. As usual, the battery test has been performed with the brightness calibrated at 200 nits as per Futuremark's recommendations.

Final thoughts

We've only had good impressions from Ulefone devices so far and the Ulefone Metal does not disappoint. The stylish smartphone has an excellent build and elegant design coupled with mid-range specifications and features. With it you get a nearly stock Android M experience combined with some useful tools that make life easier. The fingerprint sensor provides advanced options as well and if you're accustomed to using one, the sensor of Ulefone Metal will definitely please you. When the very affordable price is added to mix, you get a device that is very tempting to have.