When Yu announced Yutopia, the most expensive phone ever to be launched by an Indian brand, many wondered whether an Indian company would be able to deliver a product with the amount of polish, refinement and quality required to compete in the high-end market.
Going by user reviews, it looks like the Micromax sister company has tried hard, but ultimately come up short.
The specs are unbeatable on paper — excellent display, very powerful processor, 4 GB of DDR4 ultrafast RAM and one of the best cameras on any device available in the market.
Yet, after starting off at 4 stars out of 5 initially, the phone has now fallen to 3 stars on Amazon based on user reviews, and the reason for disappointment are not the big things — not the display, not the performance, not the battery life. In all these ways, everyone has only good things to say about the phone.
Tragically, it’s the small niggles that have irritated most users, and for a phone costing Rs 25,000 — buyers are understandably low on tolerance for such problems.
Broadly, the issues can be divided into three — software-related, hardware-related and service-related.
The last one is well known, and should not come as a big surprise given past experience.
Secondly, we come to the hardware problems. Here, most users have only praise for the excellent display and so on. Yet, Yu seems to have overlooked one tiny factor — the glue used for the rear camera lens. Many users have complained that the rear camera lens falls off as the glue was not powerful enough.
The unorthodox, protrusive design of the camera lens has also not helped matters. However, this probably did not require major re-engineering to fix.
But the fact is that it has been overlooked, and unfortunately, the lens issue has brought many buyers face to face with the first factor — service quality.
Frankly, that is the only genuine hardware flaw. There are couple of other “hardware issues” that people have flagged — not so great looks (according to some) and unpredictable fingerprint scanner function. “It should have been a PRO (fingerprint scanner) as per their ad but in real life usage its maybe one of the worst FP sensor,” pointed out Dinesh Upadhyay, a certified buyer on Amazon.
Both of these are probable not really hardware issues. From reported complaints, it looks like the Yutopia fingerprint scanner may not be faulty as such, but it could be a software problem, especially given the considerable number of software bugs that users have reported.
In terms of looks, the Yutopia does not look stunning, and that’s something that should have been clear from pictures. Yet, some users seemed to have been expecting something out of the world. “The phone doesn’t have that premium feel like the other Metallic phones it feels like Plastic,” said Chandrashekhar D.
Another ‘issue’ that some seem to be facing is that they didn’t read the spec sheet clearly and were expecting dual-SIM support with external memory support, while the phone offers a hybrid SIM slot that can be used EITHER for inserting a MicroSD card, or for a second SIM, but NOT BOTH.
More important, and most disappointing, seems to be software problems. The model runs on Cyanogen OS 12.1 operating system, and not very well either.
One user put it clearly: “Everything worked like a charm! (I) was about to give it 5 stars but after a week, found many bugs in OS, like flashlight wont work with gestures and because of this the phone would just restart on ots own.and a bit laggy software. Camera clarity was just awesome but camera app was a bit sluggish… and the camera lens was not of good quality (prone to scratches) and it was like (it was) not glued properly. Flashlight lens was moving a bit if you touch it.”
“Hopefully YU will provide good software updates in future for all the software problems and would use a good quality glue for camera lens.”
In the end, Dinesh has a word of advice for prospective buyers. “It’s a BEAST but INCOMPLETE, if you’re a patient person then YU must get it.”
YU YUTOPIA REVIEW
| what’s good | what’s not |
| AMAZING DISPLAY | SERIOUSLY BUGGY SOFTWARE |
| ULTRA POWERFUL | TEMPERAMENTAL FINGERPRINT SCANNER |
| SUPER CAMERA | MOBILE REAR CAMERA LENS |
| DECENT SOUND QUALITY | ONLY ONE SIM WITH EXTERNAL CARD |