Yu Yunique

The 4.7-inch screen of the YU Yunique sports HD resolution and looks decently sharp with a screen pixel density of 312ppi. It’s difficult to discern any pixels be it icons or text. The images look pleasing as well since the colours appear vibrant. While the viewing angles are average, the touch response of the screen was rather good. The scorching heat in Delhi was more than enough to test the screen’s brightness and the results were somewhat disappointing. We also found the auto-brightness was never appropriate considering ambient lighting. The poor legibility is also a result of the smartphone’s highly reflective display.

The YU Yunique’s primary snapper is capable of capturing stills at a resolution of 8MP. However, you will have to work with self portraits clicked at 2-megapixels.

YU has dumped Cyanogen OS this time in favour of near stock Android. The device runs the latest version of the same i.e. 5.1.1. There are slight changes in the icons but that shouldn’t bother you much. Instead of going with a lot of bloatware, YU has made a sly move. The only “extra” you will find in your app drawer is the YUniverse powered by Opera. In lieu of all the third-party apps that could have been there on your device as bloatware, the YUniverse browser subtly features them as bookmarks on its Speed Dial list. The links include Askme, Askme Bazar, OLX and Quikr.

The YU Yunique is a performance powerhouse considering the price it comes at. The device features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 SoC which has four ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.2GHz. There’s an integrated Adreno TM 306 GPU to take care of the graphics as well. There were instances when we experienced lags when opening some apps, but performance was otherwise fluid. The CPU made use of all the cores no matter how small or heavy of the apps we ran. While light usage was complemented with a clock speed of 800MHz, the engines grunted at 1.2GHz while we played heavy games like Dead Trigger 2 and Riptide GP2. The gaming experience was nice and smooth and the rendering of the graphics was pretty impressive as well. While we could feel the smartphone warming up a bit after two back to back sessions of both the games, there was no major heating. While the overall processing capabilities of the device are pretty decent, one big bummer was that it switched off randomly on its own a few times during the course of our review. The proximity sensor embedded in the YU Yunique is disappointing as well, and didn't do its job well in switching off the display during calls unless the phone was held in a specific position close to the ear.