Yu Yunicorn

One of the favourite pass times during our childhood days was the ‘spot the difference’ game, wherein one needed to point out the difference between two similar images. At first glance, the pictures seem to be the same unless one takes a closer look. It seems that nowadays, the smartphone manufacturers are also playing this game with consumers. Don’t believe us? Check out the image below and see if you can identify the two devices, and point out the differences.

The 5.5-inch display on the YU Yunicorn features a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. The IPS display panel offers impressive colours with ample brightness. However, the brightness seems to fall short outdoors since the display is quite reflective. The text remains incredibly sharp and reading eBooks or webpages on the phone was a delightful experience. The viewing angles are also quite wide.

The biggest change with the Yunicorn isn’t visible outside – it’s what’s inside. When YU debuted back in December 2014 with the Yureka (review), the brand highlighted the customisability of its software thanks to its partnership with Cyanogen. All its devices have offered Cyanogen OS, until now that is. With its latest smartphone, the company is going solo with its own custom skin based on Android. Although the underlying OS is quite dated as it stands at the version 5.1 Lollipop.

The YU Yunicorn comes with the standard set of snappers – a 13-megapixel sensor at the back and a 5MP front-facing shooter. The primary camera features an aperture of f/2.2 and is supplemented by a dual-colour LED flash. It also features PDAF to focus quickly on the subjects, though in our usage, it didn’t seem to be as fast. The shutter speed isn’t the best either.

Taking on the mantle of performance on the YU Yunicorn is MediaTek’s Helio P10 SoC, which offers eight cores clocked at 1.8GHz. The P10 is a decent processor, but sits below Taiwanese chipset maker’s flagship Helio X series. However, paired with the silicon is a monstrous 4 gigs of RAM, which suggests that the phablet is fully capable of handling anything thrown at it. It certainly manages to – at least for the most part. The navigation is smooth and switching between apps is never a concern. But the hardware fails in the most important test to gauge its prowess – gaming. While playing titles like Vector 2 and Need for Speed No Limits, there were noticeable frame drops and stutters. The graphics weren’t rendered smoothly either, even though the Mali-T860 is a capable GPU.

Another feather in YU Yunicorn’s cap is its capacious battery rating of 4,000mAh. With poor battery life being among the major issues for most mobile devices, the Yunicorn tries to take care of that issue with the use of a massive Li-Po battery. It surely lives up to the expectations, easily lasting more than a day even with a strenuous usage of gaming and GPS navigation, along with a few calls and internet browsing. With moderate usage, it might be able to last a day and a half. With both the brightness and volume at 50 percent level and everything else switched off apart from the cellular network, the smartphone played an HD video on loop for more than 14 hours straight, which is quite notable.