UMI Hammer S
The Hammer S is a larger phablet version of the UMI Hammer, the wallet-friendly Chinese phone that was billed as virtually unbreakable. It’s not just the size and weight that’s changed here, however.
UK availability
We received our review sample of the Hammer S from Coolicool. com. It’s available from its Chinese warehouse for £88.39, or the European warehouse for £108.79. It’s up to you which outlet you choose to use, but if you take the cheaper option you could end up paying more if your parcel is picked up by Customs (no charges are applicable when shipped within Europe). Read our advice on buying grey-market tech before you make that decision.
Design
For a cheap phone, the Hammer S has a really nice design. Ours came in white, but the UMI is also available in black. It’s larger and heavier than the original Hammer, but its 8.5mm design and 200g is not too extreme for a phablet, and the slightly curved edges both on the rear and the 2.5D glass on top make it easier to handle.
The frame is built from aviation-grade aluminium, and it feels not only tough but premium. Along its top edge you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone jack and IR blaster, and at the bottom a USB-C charging- and data-transfer port and a single speaker – pleasingly this has been moved from its palm-muffling rear position on the UMI Hammer. On the righthand side is a power button and volume rocker.
Turn over the Hammer S and a camera juts out a small amount from the case, sat to the left of a dual-LED flash and just above a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, which falls naturally under your forefinger when handling the phone. This cover is plastic and removable, but not flimsy or creaky, giving access to an also-removable 3200mAh battery, dual micro-SIM slots and a microSD card slot.
The 2.5D curved glass at the front adds a touch of flair and protects the edges of the screen from chips. It doesn’t lie entirely flush, however, and running your fingers over the edge you’ll feel the lip of the metal frame. Don’t do that too much, though, because the Hammer S is rather good at attracting fingerprints.
The screen itself is a large 5.5in HD panel, which means it’s usefully large for reading text or watching videos. (It’s not so hot on gaming, as we’ll come to later, but casual gaming should be fine.)
An IPS panel with a 1280x720pixel resolution, the Hammer S is bright, responsive, and has excellent viewing angles and very realistic colours. Pictures and video look good, but despite the HD resolution the large screen area means you can pick out some fuzziness around the edges of text and icons – the UMI has a pixel density of 267ppi.
Hardware and performance
The Hammer S is not the fastest phone you’ll find at this price, but in real-world use we think few users would think it slow. We never found it to take more than a second to launch an app, and there are various smart gestures that make it even quicker to access what you need from standby. Lag is minimal, too, at least in its out-of-box, almostvanilla-Android state.
But benchmarking is what we do at PC Advisor, so benchmarking we did. None of the results raised an eyebrow for any of the right reasons, but neither would we expect them to do so at this price.
In AnTuTu we recorded a lowly 20,237 points, and just 1391 points in the multi-core component of Geekbench 3.0. Performance in SunSpider was up there (or rather down there) with Android phones of the past, measuring a slow 2095ms in Chrome. Graphics weren’t any better: in GFXBench (onscreen) the Hammer S turned in 8.5fps in T-Rex and 3.5fps in Manhattan.
Given its budget price, the Hammer S’ storage and battery specifications are more attractive. There is 16GB of storage built into