Ulefone Paris
It costs less than £100 and comes with dual-SIM 4G LTE connectivity, an octa-core processor and a 5in HD screen – but is this Android phone a good buy? .
UK availability
The Ulefone Paris was sent to us by Coolicool.com, which is currently selling the budget phone on its site for £88.39. Note that this phone is shipped from China, so you may have to pay additional charges for import duty.
Design
For a budget smartphone, the Ulefone Paris has a very slight and inoffensive build. It weighs a tiny 128g, and is just 8mm thick, making it easy to operate in a single hand. Although it looks plastic, the frame is a very lightweight metal, which adds durability, while the 5in fully laminated HD IPS screen is protected with tough Gorilla Glass 3.
With 1280x720 pixels stretched across a 5in panel, the Ulefone Paris has a pixel density of 294ppi, which is a little below that of the 326ppi iPhone 6s. This means, for a sub-£100 phone, the screen is pretty clear.
With IPS screen tech, the viewing angles are good and the colours realistic, although we did find the screen a bit dull even at maximum brightness – you may find that visibility in very bright sunlight is compromised. It’s also very prone to fingerprints.
There are just two physical buttons on this phone, a volume rocker and a power switch on the righthand side. The three home, back and options buttons that sit below the screen are capacitive, and with no legends save for a white circle around the home button, you’ll need to remember which way around they operate.
As with many Chinese phones, the Micro-USB charging slot is found on the device’s top edge. Also here is a 3.5mm headphone jack, while at the bottom you’ll find the speaker grille and mic.
The Ulefone’s plastic rear is removable. It’s flimsy but holds tight to the phone and doesn’t flex or creak in normal use. Tucked underneath are dual-SIM and microSD card slots, plus a removable 2250mAh battery. A camera with LED flash sits in the top-right corner, lying almost flush to the phone. Very slight curves at the edges, and also on the screen’s 2.5D glass, make the Paris more comfortable to hold in the hand.
Hardware and performance
The Ulefone Paris ships with a 1.3GHz MediaTek MTK6753 octa-core processor, 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM and ARM Mali-T720 graphics. Performance for a budget phone is very good, and in real-life use it shows very little lag – launching the Camera app is probably the slowest thing, which takes just a couple of seconds. Plus, having all your apps on the home screen can speed up finding what you’re looking for, provided you don’t have too much installed.
Benchmarks should always be taken with a pinch of salt, but our test results are as follows: in Geekbench 3.0 we recorded 2614 points in the multi-core test, making it faster than the Vodafone Smart Ultra 6, which currently sits at the top of our budget phones chart, and not far behind the iPhone 6 and HTC One M8.
In graphics and SunSpider, it lags those phones, but is still more than a match for Vodafone’s best budget phone, with 15fps in GFXBench T-Rex (6.2fps in Manhattan) and 1489ms in SunSpider. We also ran AnTuTu, in which the Ulefone Paris recorded 29,796 points. You can compare the Ulefone Paris’ performance to all the phones we’ve recently tested in our article What’s the fastest smartphone 2015.
There’s 16GB of storage inside, although only 9GB is available to the user. Fortunately there’s a microSD card slot, which supports up to 128GB when many budget phones can accommodate only 32GB.
The battery is removable, with 2250mAh capacity. Ulefone says it provides a full working day, and 268