Micromax’s subsidiary YU Televentures has launched its second smartphone. The Yu Yuphoria is here. But is it here to stay? Or will it disappoint smartphone enthusiasts much like its predecessor, the Yu Yureka.
With the Yu Yureka, YU Televentures wanted to tap into the budget phone industry. While the phone did manage to create enough buzz and managed to find an audience for its price, it wasn’t exactly a high quality phone by any standards. Last month we put the Yu Yureka under the scanner and ran it benchmark tests to assess its performance. It didn’t fare very well in our review.
You can read the Yu Yureka benchmarking and performance review here.
So when they decided to launch a new smartphone we were curious to say the least. Let’s take a quick glance at the specs on the Yu Yuphoria.
The Yu Yuphoria runs on a 1.2 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 MSM8916 processor with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB internal storage. The phone comes with an 8 megapixel rear camera and a 5 megapixel front camera. The battery capacity on the Yu Yuphoria is a reasonable 2230 mAh and the display is a balanced 5 inch screen. And here comes perhaps the most important specification on the Yu Yuphoria – this smartphone is powered by Cyanogen OS 12. This bit of information is important because the Yu Yureka came with an earlier version of Cyanogen OS and that version proved buggy and problematic for a lot of users, myself included.
But here is the good news – the Yu Yuphoria doesn’t look or feel anything like its predecessor. Apparently YU Televentures have learnt an important lesson since their initial offering. They have ensured that the Yu Yuphoria doesn’t feel cheap by giving it a metallic frame. Changing the look of their new product might have been a desperate move by YU Televentures because the Yu Yureka certainly took a lot of flak for its average build quality.
Micromax has high expectations with this product because of the price range it falls in. At Rs. 6,999 the Yu Yuphoria is a definite competitor to the Redmi 2, Lenovo A6000, an perhaps, even the Yu Yureka. We include the Yu Yureka in that list because despite boasting of better specs than the Yuphoria, the Yureka’s build quality and buggy OS might work against it. In other words there is a small but apparent possibility that the Yuphoria might actually eat into the Yureka’s market share, however small it may be.
There is a good chance that the Yuphoria might prove to be YU Televentures’ coming-of-age product. And when that happens the Indian smartphone market could further saturate with consumers spoilt for choices.
You can register to buy the Yu Yuphoria on Amazon and it will be available for sale on the 28th of May 2015 for just Rs. 6,999. Keep watching this space for more on the Yu Yuphoria’s progress because once the phone gets into the consumer’s hands we will know for sure whether or not the euphoria surrounding the Yuphoria is here to stay.