[Closed] My Ulefone Armor 5 user review.

I said I was getting one, and I'd do a user review. I don't think the standard of my journalism will threaten that of ST Towers, and there's no photo's, (kind of tricky to take photo's of your phone - with your phone!) so hopefully they won't consider that I've stolen their thunder too much.

First thing to note, that I put on another thread is consider where you buy it from. What with getting messed about by TomTop, then putting a new order in to a different Chinese supplier it took weeks to come. Not exactly user experience, but if you want one after reading this and need it in a hurry Amazon have them listed at the moment, although at a much higher price.

The phone itself then. First thing I noticed when unpacking it was the weight. It must be hiding a metal frame in there, because it's a porky thing and the rubber case makes it pretty thick at 13mm, nearly twice that of an iPhone 7. That’s plenty to spoil the line of some premium moleskin slacks when pocketed. One aspect of that rubber bumper though is that it seems easy to grip. My previous phone took a battering from being dropped - a lot, it had a smooth curved metal case that slipped easily from the hand. It’s definitely not such a big problem with the Ulefone, although I did knock it off a table onto a tile floor this morning and it survived with not a mark, so indications of its toughness seem good.

Other hardware stuff to note. The signal strength doesn't seem quite as strong as the Motorola G it replaced, but it does have wireless calling ability which mostly makes up for that. Auto screen dimming is very random and like the STW review one mine came with a non-UK charger. Good stuff abounds though, like the NFC function is reliable and quick to make Google Payments, the fingerprint reader works quite well once you get your muscle memory used to its position and the battery is MEGA. Easily lasts all day, even with fairly heavy use.

The other important part of the function is the software, and here I'm not entirely convinced. The base Android OS doesn't seem to have been adapted too much, there's certainly no functions completely missing I've noticed and it doesn't come loaded with tons of un-removable bloatware. The chief problem is the way some of the built in apps have niggles, main one, (and this is quite a biggie) is the camera app. The first thing I found is that formatting an SD card to expand the internal memory crashes the camera app, but set it up as external memory and it’s fine. Also there are no low-res settings for the camera, which is a pain, (I regularly take photos to immediately e-mail and 14 mPixels generates a big old file!) and HDR has to be turned on at every session. The photo’s it takes seem fine as phone cameras go, hopefully I can find a better app than the built in one to improve the user experience. File manager is another one, not something I use on a daily basis granted, but when I do it’s clunky and unintuitive. There’s other little bits too, but I reckon I’ve gone on too long already and you get the gist by now.

Instead of all these ramblings, I probably could have just answered the important, would I recommend it question. On balance, I’m not sure I would. Unless you really need it waterproof, I think a more mainstream phone in a protective cover would be a better bet in the physical format, (lighter and less bulky even with a cover) The software annoyances also mark it down in my eyes, it seems a development generation behind the previous Motorola G. I probably should have just bought a later version of that and a thin shell.

If you’ve got any specific questions that I’ve missed, happy to answer them.