Doogee S98 Review - Rear Dial Display, Night Vision camera, 64MP main shooter, 6000 mAh battery, and other perks in a beautiful rugged smartphone

Overview

The Doogee S98 is the latest addition to Doogee's S series of ruggedized smartphones. In addition to a well-balanced spec sheet and the ability to withstand the challenges of rough environments, each of the "S" smartphones has a distinctive feature. The S98's distinctive feature is a second display on the back in the form of a digital clock. It is a color display that's touch-sensitive and has three skins to choose from - clock, answer/decline calls, and music player controls. We'll get back to it in the display section of this review but first things first - let's overview the Doogee S98 specifications and check what's in the box.

Specifications

The Doogee S98 is fitted with a 6.3-inch IPS display with an FHD+ resolution of (1080 x 2340). The manufacturer specifies 480 nits of typical brightness and a 1500:1 static contrast ratio. Corning Gorilla Glass of unknown generation protects the screen. The waterdrop notch is the home of the 16MP Samsung S5K3P3 selfie camera with an f/2.0 aperture, 5-element lens, and an 80° FoV. On the back, the rear dial display is accompanied by the 64MP OmniVision OV64B40 main camera with an f/1.79 aperture, 6-element lens, and a 90° FoV, an 8MP Samsung S5K4H7 ultra-wide-angle unit with a 130° FoV, and a 20MP Sony IMX350 Night Vision camera. The model has a 6000 mAh battery pack with 33W fast charging and 15W wireless charging support. A MediaTek Helio G96 chipset with a 2.05GHz octa-core CPU and a dual-core ARM Mali-G57 GPU is responsible for the processing power. There's a single RAM+storage version: 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB of UFS 2.2 storage onboard. The built-in memory can be expanded by up to 512GB.

The Doogee S98 has a dual Nano-SIM tray with a dedicated slot for a microSD card. Both SIM cards support 4G VoLTE. The network bands supported by both cards are as follows: 2G GSM (2/3/5/8), 3G WCDMA (1/2/4/5/6/8/19), 4G TDD-LTE (34/38/39/40/41), 4G FDD-LTE (B1/2/3/4/5/7/8/12/13/17/18/19/20/25/26/28A/28B/66). The wireless connectivity options of the model include Bluetooth 5.1, dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Hotspot, and Wi-Fi Display. The smartphone also supports NFC and works with GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and Beidou. The device has a USB Type-C port and a side-mounted fingerprint sensor. It runs on almost stock Android 12. The rugged body is IP68 and IP69K rated for water and dust resistance and has a MIL-STD-810G certification for resistance to drops, shock, pressure, humidity, acidic atmosphere, temperature extremes, and similar types of impact.

Complete Doogee S98 specifications.

What's in the box

The Doogee S98 is placed in a flat, black rectangular box with a textile-like surface. The brand name is imprinted on top of the lid n silver color and the model name is stickered in the bottom right corner of the lid. The list of items accompanying the smartphone inside the box includes:

• 33W USB Type-C charger (EU plug)
• USB Type-C cable
• Screen protector
• Screen protector accessories
• SIM tray opening tool
• User manual