The Ulefone Metal has been announced – metal-clad midranger for the budget-minded

Ulefone is steadily becoming popular among smartphone fans for building good-looking, well spec'd out, and very reasonably priced smartphones. The company does hail from China, which would usually make it a bit hard to obtain its handsets internationally, but thanks to a number of officially endorsed 3rd party resellers, it's not too hard to track down an Ulefone device and buy it online, which is a huge plus. The manufacturer has just announced its latest midranger — the Ulefone Metal — with an attractive-looking chassis, fingerprint scanner, and compact dimensions.

Design

The Metal definitely looks like a device you wouldn't mind being seen with. The device is wrapped in a magnesium-aluminum alloy, crafted with rounded-off corners on its back for better ergonomics. A full glass panel with slightly arched corners covers the front of the handset. The phone's dimensions measure at 5.62 x 2.79 x 0.37 inches (143 x 71 x 9.35mm) and it has a 5-inch display, which translates to a 68.13% screen-to-body ratio. The hardware power button and volume up and down keys can be found on the device's right frame, and there is a 360-degree fingerprint scanner nested on its back, just underneath the camera.

Hardware and camera

The Ulefone Metal packs an octa-core, 1.3 GHz, MT6753 SoC with an ARM Mali-T720 GPU — MediaTek's response to the midrange Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC. In the memory department, it's equipped with 3 GB of RAM and 16 GB of expandable internal storage. Its 5-inch display has a 720 x 1280 (HD) pixel resolution, making up for a pixel-per-inch density of about 290. The Metal is powered by a respectable 3,050 mAh juicer, which should make for a pretty long battery life, considering the smaller, HD screen and power-friendly hardware.

The main camera has an F2.0 aperture lens and an 8 MP Sony Exmor IMX 149 sensor, while the selfie snapper has a 2 MP resolution. However, Ulefone uses software interpolation to enhance the snappers resolutions to 13 MP and 5 MP respectively. Ulefone claims that the lower resolution of the main sensor allows for more light and better color accuracy to be captured by each individual pixel.



As for connectivity, the Metal works on GSM 850, 900, 1800, 1900 (band 5, band 8, band 3, band 2), WCDMA 900, 2100 (band 8, band 1), FDD-LTE 800, 900, 1800, 2100, 2600 (band 20, band 8, band 3, band 1, band 7), and TDD-LTE 2300 (Band 40), so make sure your carrier supports at least some of these if you are planning to grab the handset.

Interface

Ulefone doesn't seem to be a proponent of heavy Android skins as of late. On its previous smartphone — the Future — it installed a mostly stock Android 6 Marshmallow to please fans of the vanilla version of Google's OS. With the Metal, however, it has added a few enhancements.

There's an optional Assistive Touch-type menu, and the fingerprint sensor can be used to launch up to 5 different apps when the user touches it with one of 5 pre-registered fingers, specific apps can be launched with gesture swipes when the phone is in standby, there is a wave-to-wake functionality, and the menus have had a visual re-touch.

Price and launch

The Metal will be up for sale by the end of July in three different colors – Black, Space Gray, and Silver White. For the next 10 days, Ulefone has a special treat for its fans — the company will be keeping the phone's price a secret for now, and will hold a special giveaway contest. If you follow the link below, you will be taken to a poll, asking you to guess what the handset's price would be. Guess right and you will be entered in a pool of potential Ulefone Metal giveaway winners!

Ulefone Metal giveaway contest

Ulefone Metal official website