Review Summary
Expert Rating
If given an opportunity to design a dream smartphone, most of us would choose for it to have an extremely rugged design that can survive falls with ease and have battery life that can last for days. One brand that has existed for years and has been making phones with these exact two aspects in mind is DOOGEE. In fact, the whole reputation of the brand is built around these two pillars.
DOOGEE caters to consumers who want phones with a rugged build and adventure-friendly features. While Samsung has its XCover series of rugged smartphones for adventure lovers too, it offers major compromises, such as an LCD display, low charging speeds, and much smaller batteries.
DOOGEE’s S200X smartphone is available on Amazon India for around Rs 45,000, but it was listed as unavailable at the time of writing this review. And if you’re in the market for a rugged phone, you might want to read this review before you make your purchase.
Table of Contents
Verdict
DOOGEE S200X has some impressive features for durability, but it is quite bulky and struggles in the camera department. The phone definitely leaves a mark for its specific category, but it feels cumbersome and underwhelming for everyday usage. If you travel a lot and want a phone that can survive your adventures, this could be a good choice; however, it is best not look at it as a daily driver.
Built like a tank and looks the part
There are some fairly slim phones in market that offer impressive durability. Some names that pop into the mind right away are Motorola Edge 70, OPPO F31 Pro+, and the newly released OPPO A6 Pro, among others. While these handsets are great for most users, to offer true durability, the phone needs to be built in such a way that it can survive anything that you throw at it.
In this regard, you can take one look at the S200X and be assured that the handset doesn’t need to be handled delicately and can be used in literally any scenario. In fact, I intentionally dropped the phone multiple times on the floor to check how it fared, and the results were really impressive. To give you an even better idea of how solid this smartphone is in terms of build quality, let me share an incident with you. While reviewing the phone, there was one time when I dropped the phone accidentally on my work desk from standing height. The first concern that I had was that I might have damaged the desk, not the phone.
However, this top-notch durability comes at a cost. The phone is hefty and not meant for casual users. It measures 179.5×82.5×16 mm and weighs 262 grams. That thickness and weight might have already raised some eyebrows, but keep in mind that this is a special utility smartphone.
Now that we have addressed the elephant in the room, let’s move to the rest of the design elements. The S200X looks like a gaming smartphone with a mecha design language. The Golden Guardian unit I received features a mix of orange and black metal and plastic elements that provide the phone with a loud but unique and attractive look. The phone also comes in Green Ranger (Green and black) and Black Samurai (Black and grey) options.
The phone comes with a volume rocker on the right spine, right above the power button with an embedded fingerprint sensor. On the left side of the phone, you get the SIM card tray slot above a special function key.
You can choose to assign single press, double press, and long press functions to different apps and shortcuts to this button through phone settings. At the bottom of the phone, you’ll find a USB Type-C charging port, protected by a rubberised coating to offer water resistance.
The standout design aspect of the phone is a 1.32-inch circular display (466×466 pixels) at the back that gives you access to notifications, battery percentage, time, calendar, camera (for selfies with the rear cameras), instant toggles for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Airplane mode, volume settings, and music controls. While I must admit the circular panel is not as responsive as I would have liked, it still gets the job done even when the phone is flipped with the display facing down.
Although I could easily feel the weight of the phone while carrying it around in the pocket, it was not as bad as I thought it would feel in the long run.
One nice design touch that the brand has included on the phone is a hook point that allows you to latch the phone to your jacket/bag. This little detail would be really appreciated by those who love to go hiking or mountain climbing. As you might expect, the USB Type-C charging port is protected by a rubber flap that effectively prevents any dirt from entering the slot as well.
With IP68, IP69K, and MIL-STD-810H durability ratings, the phone can easily be used in the harshest of conditions.
Surprisingly good display with one pain point
While most other rugged phones struggle on this front, DOOGEE has managed to ship the S200X with a surprisingly good display. The 6.72-inch FHD+ (2400×1080 pixels) AMOLED display features a contrast ratio of 1400:1 and a high refresh rate of 120Hz that feels smooth and responsive. One thing that felt a bit odd to me is that while there are thick bezels around the display, for some reason, the brand has still opted for a waterdrop notch design to incorporate the selfie camera.
Leaving this qualm aside, the phone’s display feels vibrant and immersive with deep blacks that enhance the content viewing experience. The 120Hz refresh rate of the display ensures that the interface feels smooth to navigate around, and playing games on this panel is a fun and seamless experience too (especially first-person shooters such as BGMI, Call of Duty: Mobile, and Garena Free Fire).
The phone’s display viewing angles were pretty decent, but I wouldn’t say they were on par with some mainstream smartphones.
For a smartphone designed from the ground up for frequent travellers and adventure-seeking consumers, one area where the S200X’s display struggles is peak brightness. The phone’s display’s peak brightness of 450 nits does a decent job in low-light scenarios and indoors; however, under direct sunlight, the legibility takes a backseat.
Camera performance
The DOOGEE S200X ships with a 100MP AI main camera, assisted by a 20MP Night Vision and a 2MP macro shooter. While looking at the specs, I assumed that the camera setup would do a great job and also bring a lot of variety to the table. However, these expectations were short-lived.
Despite featuring a high-resolution primary camera, the phone struggles while capturing details, even with ample sunlight. The colour accuracy is average, and the macro camera presents a lot of issues while adjusting focus.
But the problems don’t end there. The portrait shots struggle with edge detection, and the phone fails to capture skin tone accurately. The facial details are lost while clicking pictures of human subjects, and the selfie camera doesn’t manage to give the desired output too. Have a look at the camera samples below and be your own judge:
The silver lining here is the Night Vision camera, which manages to click some really good shots in extremely dark environments.
While I think this phone deserves leeway in some departments, I believe that adventure enthusiasts want good camera performance from their phones to capture crucial moments. This is one department where the phone clearly falls short.
Performance and Software
Powered by the 6nm Dimensity 7050 SoC, the S200X comes with 12GB of on-board RAM (expandable by up to 36GB of additional on-demand RAM) and 512GB of storage (expandable up to 2TB with a microSD card). Let me clarify straight away, the S200X is not a performance beast by any means, and it doesn’t aim to be that either. In this price range, you can easily find phones with far more powerful chipsets. However, as this phone is meant for a special kind of audience, I’ll refrain from comparing it with other handsets. I’ll instead try to share how it tackles everyday tasks and apps.
To check the phone’s performance, I played some of the more demanding games, and it handled them pretty well. One thing I realised while playing these games was that the phone’s sheer thickness and weight prevented me from playing for long stretches. Again, for a special utility phone, does the job reasonably well, as I didn’t face any stutter or heating issues. However, don’t expect a flagship-grade gaming experience from this handset.
As far as benchmarks are concerned, the handset scored 8,57,992 on AnTuTu, which is closer to the scores of phones priced around Rs 25,000 – Rs 30,000. On Geekbench, the S200X scored 996 in single-core and 2340 in multi-core. Again, these are underwhelming scores for the phone’s existing price range, but this is not a performance-centric phone, and it doesn’t struggle in carrying out everyday tasks.
The S200X runs on a custom yet clean version of Android 16 with very few pre-installed apps. This means that the phone doesn’t shove unnecessary apps in your face and gives you the freedom to customise it as per your liking. While the phone also offers an AI assistant, it mostly feels gimmicky and like an afterthought.
Overall, the S200X offers reliable performance that doesn’t stand out, but at the end of the day, gets the job done.
Battery Life
With a 10,100mAh battery, you’d expect the S200X to last long, and it really does. In regular usage, I managed to extract 2.5 days of battery life from the phone. In light usage, this stretched to even 3 days. Even for power users, the phone should easily last beyond 1.5 days, in my estimate.
When I ran the PCMark battery test on the phone, it surprisingly lasted just 13 hours and 14 minutes. While I found this number to be surprising at first, when I used the phone for some time, I realised that the area in which the phone’s battery excels is standby battery drain. When left idle for a long time, the phone shows little to no drain, and that helps it deliver long battery life (apart from the fact that it ships with a 10,100mAh cell).
With a 33W fast charging support, I managed to charge the phone fully from 0 to 100 percent in 2 hours and 12 minutes, which is a fairly long time by modern standards.
Final verdict
The S200X is unapologetically confident about what it is meant to do – offer durability. And in that department, it does a great job. It offers you a long-lasting battery life, a rear display that allows for a few neat tricks, an impressive AMOLED display with a high refresh rate, and a clean user interface that is really well optimised. This is a phone meant for frequent travellers and those who engage in adventure activities. Keeping that in mind, I would have really wished that this phone were more compact, offered better camera quality, and weighed slightly less. Having said that, this might be one of the most attractive rugged phone options that you can buy in the market (when available) with the features it has, especially for its price.
Editor’s rating: 7.8 / 10
Pros:
- Top-notch durability for harsh weather conditions
- Massive 10,100mAh battery
- Night vision camera works really well
- Rear display is quite useful
Cons:
- Display legibility under direct sunlight
- Large form factor
- General camera performance
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