Doogee Valencia2 Y100 Pro Tech Review
A couple of weeks ago I have been contacted by GearBest asking me if I was interested in doing tech reviews of some products; since I am close to WeTek I said yes, as soon as it doesn't involve TV Boxes or similar devices or it would be a bit awkward...
I was thrilled by the idea, specially because sometimes I wanted to know something more before purchasing a device (like exactly which 3G/4G bands it supports, watching camera shots of the same subject at different ISO to compare the noise / noise reduction, geeky stuff LOL.), and I never found (easily) such infos.
They asked me if I wanted to try the Y100 Pro and I immediately said yes because I was really looking forward to see which LTE bands supports a MT6735 device and, I will be honest, it looks very nice!
So, after a couple of days it arrived. When I held it in my hands it was feeling very confortable, right now I have been using for the last 4 months a JiaYu S3S which I really like but the 5.5'' form factor is too big for my hands (I never dropped a phone in the last 10 years but this one, probably because of the size not tailored for my hands, I actually dropped it twice in Vegas, maybe the dry weather made it a bit more slippery).
It's a little heavy for being a 5'' device, but it's well balanced and I'm not a huge fan of devices that I can't feel in my hands, so, for me, this is not really a problem but actually makes me enjoy the device more.
JiaYu S3 (5.5'') - Doogee Y100 Pro (5.0'') - HTC One X (4.7'')
I tried to turn it on (the battery is already in the device) and, oh sh... it doesn't turn on! Don't make the same mistake as me: when it arrives remove the battery and take out that little piece of plastic that it's been put between battery's contacts and the device itself (as protection to avoid it from turning on accidentally).
Display
First boot is fast (the rom is odexed so Art doesn't have much work to do) and you will be delighted by a very nice 720p display made by AUO (according to something found in the sysfs entries).
I know that today if you don't have at least a 2k device you are not cool but let's be honest: you will see some pixels but only if you are a pixel peeper and look very close to the device trying to find them; moreover the soc sports a Mali T720 that is in the lower end side (in the same class as Adreno 305/306) so, if you wanna play something 3D choosing a FHD display would totally kill the performance.
Blacks are nice (remember it's not an AMOLED), colors seems pretty accurate (and in case you can customize them using Mediatek's MiraVision settings), it is bright enough to be readable under the summer midday sun here in Italy and has decent viewing angles (I don't know you but 99.999999% of the time I look at my phone from the front).
Speaking of the brightness, if you never used Lollipop you are going to see that automatic brightness has been replaced by adaptive brightness; this means that you are going to select a target brightness using the slider and the sensor will dim or increase it.
I find it works much better than automatic brightness and it's one of the things I really enjoyed of the device
I just keep the brightness slider at approximately 1/3 and the sensor does everything keeping the display very dim during the night in my bedroom (my eyes thank it a lot!) and brightening it up outdoor.
Three things I didn't like about the display are the lack of backlight in the capacitive buttons, the display itself not been very oleophobic and the lack of a notification LED.
Radio
WiFi supports B/G/N networks and connects up to 65 MBit/s.
These are some LAN speed tests at different distances from the router:
I tested Bluetooth by pairing my Xiaomi Mi Band using Play Store's app and worked fine, it never dropped the connection and, if it did, (moving out of range for example) reconnection was very fast, much faster than the JiaYu.
GPS is very good and in par with JiaYu S3, both them get the same satellites (9 indoor standing at a window, 4/6 more outside) with similar SNR.
Phone signal is excellent, period. It probably has the best signal reception among all the devices I used so far in fact I can get a solid 1/2 bars signal in places where other devices switch to roaming (and it's not a "fake" signal like it happens with the S3 where the device shows signal but can't call, can't surf, etc. it's real signal).
I wish I had this device with me for my 3 months staying in the US so I would have been able to use LTE with MetroPCS, T-Mobile or AT&T: the soc supports pretty much all the bands you might need:
If you travel to the USA you definitely want this device as you will be able to surf at LTE speeds and in worst case using the 3G AWS band that has the widest coverage in the US.
It will accept one micro sim and one mini sim (the "older" sim) and you can switch from Android settings which one of them will get 3G/4G signal (and the other one will be limited to 2G) but you can't assign a different ringtone to a specific sim.
In call audio quality is good, as it should be from a device that is mainly a phone; I could hear loud and clear my caller and the same was for her.
Watching the device from the front, antennas are located in the top right (4G), top left (WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS) and bottom right (2G/3G) corners, so if you hold your device with the left hand you won't cover mobile antennas.
Storage
Main storage is a 16GB eMMC that can be extended using a MicroSD or by using an OTG cable.
I tried a 64GB MicroSD card and it worked, just remember to format it as FAT32 since the rom doesn't have support for ExFat, NTFS or EXT4 file systems.
Speed of the integrated eMMC is not bad scoring 31 MB/s (write) - 97 MB/s (read) speed. The bus that connects the MicroSD is a fast one as well, in fact if you are going to use a very fast card (I tried a Sandisk Extreme) you can reach 36 MB/s (write) - 51 MB/s (read) speeds.
USB is a 2.0 with the micro connector, no type-C.
The rom is not bloated and uses the "datamedia" partition layout (so internal storage and /data are shared and there's no dedicated partition that will waste space) and you will get almost 12GB free at first boot.
One curious thing is that the MicroSD will be mounted under /storage/sdcard0 so some apps will use it as primary storage.
This will be surely appreciated: apps can be moved to the SD, make sure you use a fast card if you are going to use this feature.
Multimedia
Main camera is a Sony IMX219 (8Mpxl 1/4'' size) with a bright f/2.0 lens, while front camera is the usual OmniVision OV5648 (5 Mpxl) used in many Chinese devices.
Despite the device is shipped with Lollipop, camera HAL is still using the old APIs, it doesn't have support for Camera API2 that will allow advanced functions for the camera (like RAW saving, exposure compensation in third of stops, manual shutter speed, manual focus, etc.).
Camera software is the usual Mediatek one very close to AOSP camera.
Autofocus is very fast!
I grabbed some pictures at various ISO levels (100-200-400-800-1600) using Camera FV-5 setting the output size at 8 Mpxl (instead of the interpolated 13 Mpxl default value) on a tripod to see how good (or bad) does this tiny (average of nowadays phone's sensor size is 1/3.1'' with some devices running a 1/2.3'' sensor) sensor behave (click the thumbnail for a 1:1 magnification):
As you can see it becomes noisy pretty easily, but at least they don't use too much contrast mask and noise reduction that would make the result appear worse.
In real life shots the camera is decent when there is a good amount of light but the picture becomes easily noisy and lacks of details starting with ISO 400, the sensor is really small and can't make wonders... the lens seems not bad and sharp enough even in the corners.
Let's be honest... You are not going to buy this phone for its camera but it's not really bad, actually it can compete, imho, with the one from JiaYu S3 (that sports its big brother IMX213) with the S3 been a bit advantaged in low light shots because of its slightly bigger sensor (but it has a really crappy lens as well, so that's why they can be pretty similar in results).
There is a single LED flashlight that can be triggered from the status bar's toggle (there's no hw button access with display turned off, for that you might need an xposed module).
I have not tested the front camera that much since I am not a selfie person and it's usually worse than the main one...
Video can be recorded up to 1280x720 at 30fps using the main camera.
Video playback failed to play HEVC samples in hw decoding, H264 samples worked up to 1080p (no hw decoding for 2k or 4k videos).
YouTube max video size is capped at 720p but being a 720p display it's not a big deal.
There is an accelerometer, a light sensor, a microphone (I looked for a secondary one for noise suppression but haven't found it) and a proximity sensor; so there's no gyroscope and magnetic field sensor, consider this if GPS navigation is your top priority.
The (single, not dual) speaker is located in the bottom of the device and is configured as default with a volume enhancer that makes it sound louder but, imho, way too metallic and flat, distorting at high volume levels; in fact I prefer listening to a quiter speaker that sounds better.
Despite being on the bottom of the device it won't affect sound that much when it's sitting on the table or bed.
Headphone output is good and gives a very loud sound without statics when there's no sound being played.
MT6735 soc and stock Lollipop 5.1
This soc is a low-end one, targeted to compete with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 410. Both them in fact score approximately 20k-21k AnTuTu points and similar FPS in GFXBench off-screen (1080p) tests.
It is a quad core 64-bit Cortex A53 and it can switch its clock frequencies between 221MHz and 988 MHz, the GPU is a Mali T720 that sits at 299MHz while idling and ramps up to 550MHz when it's running.
Something weird that I have noticed is that when the GPU reaches 550MHz, then only one core is used while the other three are parked. Another interesting thing that you might notice is that you can see three cores up and running at their maximum frequency as soon as you put a finger on the touchscreen (to make the device appear more responsive).
Despite the 30C degrees while running the tests I haven't seen any thermal throttling and the device was never too hot (it gets hotter when transferring data in 3G/4G).
I said the soc is a 64-bit one but Lollipop 5.1 has not been built with 64-bit support and neither did the kernel (in fact the kernel identifies it as an ARMv7 instead of an ARMv8), I don't think that a 64-bit OS might bring any relevant change rather than a slightly bigger memory footprint on this device... but people running Lollipop on a 64-bit capable soc expects to see it running at 64-bit. You will get some targeted CFLAGS optimizations for the ARMv8 instructions set but it's not going to be a game changer.
This 5.1 build is very fast and the device barely lags (actually it looks like you're using a Windows Phone!), it's only a bit slow when it has to install big apps because Art has to compile the APK and it's a process CPU dependent.
It's a very AOSP rom with only additional stuff to support the Mediatek soc (HotKnot, audio enhancements that I suggest you to keep disabled, smart gestures, smart wake-up, MiraVision). Unluckily such changes bring some cosmetic issues like the one you can observe here:
where they should have used a white icon... anyway it's just a cosmetic detail that cwon't affect user experience (unless you have OCD, lol).
The rom uses a traditional launcher with the drawer but I replaced it with Nova and its integrated Lollipop icon theme as I didn't like the stock one.
The 2GB of ram are enough and the OS handles it much better than 5.0, most of the times I have more than 900MB free while running a browser with 5 tabs opened (Firefox) and many other apps in the background.
It looks like that under the sticker there's reported a less capable battery than what's advertised... I don't understand such things, just be honest, specially considering that with my usage (WiFi/BT/GPS always on, 2 gmail accounts and 1 exchange account in push, social networks, instant messaging, browsing, everything but gaming practically) I cover perfectly a day from morning to late night with 4.30/5 hours of display on stats (and my battery has still to give its best since it's new) so there would have been no reason to lie as the overall device specs are enough for the real battery amperage.
Root access
Usually Mediatek devices come rooted out of the factory with a SuperUser toggle to enable in the security settings, this device does not but I found a way to flash SuperSU using the stock recovery.
This process has been tested but it might soft brick your phone and, as of today, there is no FlashTool flashable rom that will recover a device from such brick state.
Anyway, if you feel brave enough, download this zip (please don't re-host it or alter the link as I would like to track down the download statistics) and copy it to your MicroSD card.
Power off the device and turn it on keeping VOL+ and Power until you see some tiny text.
Select the first option (Recovery mode), use VOL+ to navigate and VOL- to confirm.
Once booted to stock recovery select "apply update from sdcard" using VOL+/- to navigate and POWER to confirm, and select the zip file you copied to the MicroSD.
After the flash has completed you will be back to recovery's main screen and just select "reboot system now".
PS: this zip file should work with any MT67** device running a stock Mediatek recovery
PPS: DO NOT apply any incremental ota update after flashing the root zip, flash ONLY flash tool roms when and if they will be available
Conclusions
The only things that I didn't like so far are the lack of a notification LED and the speaker audio volume that once disabled the enhancer sounds quiter (but much better), you have to consider that we are speaking of a device that costs 110/120$ and you can't pretend the same quality as devices at least twice more expensive.
The device itself doesn't look cheap at all, the rom doesn't have noticeable bugs and is updated to the latest Android OS.
WiFi and phone signal quality are above the average of the Chinese devices I have tried so far and if you travel you can get a signal pretty much everywhere!
If you are a mobile gamer I would buy something else but if you just want a good looking phone with good ergonomics, a decent camera and at an affordable price I would definitely consider this one.
Thanks again to GearBest for giving me the opportunity to try this phone and write this review.
A couple of weeks ago I have been contacted by GearBest asking me if I was interested in doing tech reviews of some products; since I am close to WeTek I said yes, as soon as it doesn't involve TV Boxes or similar devices or it would be a bit awkward...
I was thrilled by the idea, specially because sometimes I wanted to know something more before purchasing a device (like exactly which 3G/4G bands it supports, watching camera shots of the same subject at different ISO to compare the noise / noise reduction, geeky stuff LOL.), and I never found (easily) such infos.
They asked me if I wanted to try the Y100 Pro and I immediately said yes because I was really looking forward to see which LTE bands supports a MT6735 device and, I will be honest, it looks very nice!
So, after a couple of days it arrived. When I held it in my hands it was feeling very confortable, right now I have been using for the last 4 months a JiaYu S3S which I really like but the 5.5'' form factor is too big for my hands (I never dropped a phone in the last 10 years but this one, probably because of the size not tailored for my hands, I actually dropped it twice in Vegas, maybe the dry weather made it a bit more slippery).
It's a little heavy for being a 5'' device, but it's well balanced and I'm not a huge fan of devices that I can't feel in my hands, so, for me, this is not really a problem but actually makes me enjoy the device more.
JiaYu S3 (5.5'') - Doogee Y100 Pro (5.0'') - HTC One X (4.7'')
I tried to turn it on (the battery is already in the device) and, oh sh... it doesn't turn on! Don't make the same mistake as me: when it arrives remove the battery and take out that little piece of plastic that it's been put between battery's contacts and the device itself (as protection to avoid it from turning on accidentally).
Display
First boot is fast (the rom is odexed so Art doesn't have much work to do) and you will be delighted by a very nice 720p display made by AUO (according to something found in the sysfs entries).
I know that today if you don't have at least a 2k device you are not cool but let's be honest: you will see some pixels but only if you are a pixel peeper and look very close to the device trying to find them; moreover the soc sports a Mali T720 that is in the lower end side (in the same class as Adreno 305/306) so, if you wanna play something 3D choosing a FHD display would totally kill the performance.
Blacks are nice (remember it's not an AMOLED), colors seems pretty accurate (and in case you can customize them using Mediatek's MiraVision settings), it is bright enough to be readable under the summer midday sun here in Italy and has decent viewing angles (I don't know you but 99.999999% of the time I look at my phone from the front).
Speaking of the brightness, if you never used Lollipop you are going to see that automatic brightness has been replaced by adaptive brightness; this means that you are going to select a target brightness using the slider and the sensor will dim or increase it.
I find it works much better than automatic brightness and it's one of the things I really enjoyed of the device
I just keep the brightness slider at approximately 1/3 and the sensor does everything keeping the display very dim during the night in my bedroom (my eyes thank it a lot!) and brightening it up outdoor.Three things I didn't like about the display are the lack of backlight in the capacitive buttons, the display itself not been very oleophobic and the lack of a notification LED.
Radio
WiFi supports B/G/N networks and connects up to 65 MBit/s.
These are some LAN speed tests at different distances from the router:
- Close to the router: 40 MBit upload / 40 MBit download
- 7mt (with one brick wall in the middle): 35 MBit upload / 35 MBit download
- 12 mt (with two brick walls in the middle): 18 MBit upload / 19 MBit download
I tested Bluetooth by pairing my Xiaomi Mi Band using Play Store's app and worked fine, it never dropped the connection and, if it did, (moving out of range for example) reconnection was very fast, much faster than the JiaYu.
GPS is very good and in par with JiaYu S3, both them get the same satellites (9 indoor standing at a window, 4/6 more outside) with similar SNR.
Phone signal is excellent, period. It probably has the best signal reception among all the devices I used so far in fact I can get a solid 1/2 bars signal in places where other devices switch to roaming (and it's not a "fake" signal like it happens with the S3 where the device shows signal but can't call, can't surf, etc. it's real signal).
I wish I had this device with me for my 3 months staying in the US so I would have been able to use LTE with MetroPCS, T-Mobile or AT&T: the soc supports pretty much all the bands you might need:
- 2G: 850/900/1800/1900
- 3G: 850/900/1700(AWS)/1900(PCS)/2000
- 4G: Band 1/2/3/4/7/17/20
If you travel to the USA you definitely want this device as you will be able to surf at LTE speeds and in worst case using the 3G AWS band that has the widest coverage in the US.
It will accept one micro sim and one mini sim (the "older" sim) and you can switch from Android settings which one of them will get 3G/4G signal (and the other one will be limited to 2G) but you can't assign a different ringtone to a specific sim.
In call audio quality is good, as it should be from a device that is mainly a phone; I could hear loud and clear my caller and the same was for her.
Watching the device from the front, antennas are located in the top right (4G), top left (WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS) and bottom right (2G/3G) corners, so if you hold your device with the left hand you won't cover mobile antennas.
Storage
Main storage is a 16GB eMMC that can be extended using a MicroSD or by using an OTG cable.
I tried a 64GB MicroSD card and it worked, just remember to format it as FAT32 since the rom doesn't have support for ExFat, NTFS or EXT4 file systems.
Speed of the integrated eMMC is not bad scoring 31 MB/s (write) - 97 MB/s (read) speed. The bus that connects the MicroSD is a fast one as well, in fact if you are going to use a very fast card (I tried a Sandisk Extreme) you can reach 36 MB/s (write) - 51 MB/s (read) speeds.
USB is a 2.0 with the micro connector, no type-C.
The rom is not bloated and uses the "datamedia" partition layout (so internal storage and /data are shared and there's no dedicated partition that will waste space) and you will get almost 12GB free at first boot.
One curious thing is that the MicroSD will be mounted under /storage/sdcard0 so some apps will use it as primary storage.
This will be surely appreciated: apps can be moved to the SD, make sure you use a fast card if you are going to use this feature.
Multimedia
Main camera is a Sony IMX219 (8Mpxl 1/4'' size) with a bright f/2.0 lens, while front camera is the usual OmniVision OV5648 (5 Mpxl) used in many Chinese devices.
Despite the device is shipped with Lollipop, camera HAL is still using the old APIs, it doesn't have support for Camera API2 that will allow advanced functions for the camera (like RAW saving, exposure compensation in third of stops, manual shutter speed, manual focus, etc.).
Camera software is the usual Mediatek one very close to AOSP camera.
Autofocus is very fast!
I grabbed some pictures at various ISO levels (100-200-400-800-1600) using Camera FV-5 setting the output size at 8 Mpxl (instead of the interpolated 13 Mpxl default value) on a tripod to see how good (or bad) does this tiny (average of nowadays phone's sensor size is 1/3.1'' with some devices running a 1/2.3'' sensor) sensor behave (click the thumbnail for a 1:1 magnification):
As you can see it becomes noisy pretty easily, but at least they don't use too much contrast mask and noise reduction that would make the result appear worse.
In real life shots the camera is decent when there is a good amount of light but the picture becomes easily noisy and lacks of details starting with ISO 400, the sensor is really small and can't make wonders... the lens seems not bad and sharp enough even in the corners.
Let's be honest... You are not going to buy this phone for its camera but it's not really bad, actually it can compete, imho, with the one from JiaYu S3 (that sports its big brother IMX213) with the S3 been a bit advantaged in low light shots because of its slightly bigger sensor (but it has a really crappy lens as well, so that's why they can be pretty similar in results).
There is a single LED flashlight that can be triggered from the status bar's toggle (there's no hw button access with display turned off, for that you might need an xposed module).
I have not tested the front camera that much since I am not a selfie person and it's usually worse than the main one...
Video can be recorded up to 1280x720 at 30fps using the main camera.
Video playback failed to play HEVC samples in hw decoding, H264 samples worked up to 1080p (no hw decoding for 2k or 4k videos).
YouTube max video size is capped at 720p but being a 720p display it's not a big deal.
There is an accelerometer, a light sensor, a microphone (I looked for a secondary one for noise suppression but haven't found it) and a proximity sensor; so there's no gyroscope and magnetic field sensor, consider this if GPS navigation is your top priority.
The (single, not dual) speaker is located in the bottom of the device and is configured as default with a volume enhancer that makes it sound louder but, imho, way too metallic and flat, distorting at high volume levels; in fact I prefer listening to a quiter speaker that sounds better.
Despite being on the bottom of the device it won't affect sound that much when it's sitting on the table or bed.
Headphone output is good and gives a very loud sound without statics when there's no sound being played.
MT6735 soc and stock Lollipop 5.1
This soc is a low-end one, targeted to compete with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 410. Both them in fact score approximately 20k-21k AnTuTu points and similar FPS in GFXBench off-screen (1080p) tests.
It is a quad core 64-bit Cortex A53 and it can switch its clock frequencies between 221MHz and 988 MHz, the GPU is a Mali T720 that sits at 299MHz while idling and ramps up to 550MHz when it's running.
Something weird that I have noticed is that when the GPU reaches 550MHz, then only one core is used while the other three are parked. Another interesting thing that you might notice is that you can see three cores up and running at their maximum frequency as soon as you put a finger on the touchscreen (to make the device appear more responsive).
Despite the 30C degrees while running the tests I haven't seen any thermal throttling and the device was never too hot (it gets hotter when transferring data in 3G/4G).
I said the soc is a 64-bit one but Lollipop 5.1 has not been built with 64-bit support and neither did the kernel (in fact the kernel identifies it as an ARMv7 instead of an ARMv8), I don't think that a 64-bit OS might bring any relevant change rather than a slightly bigger memory footprint on this device... but people running Lollipop on a 64-bit capable soc expects to see it running at 64-bit. You will get some targeted CFLAGS optimizations for the ARMv8 instructions set but it's not going to be a game changer.
This 5.1 build is very fast and the device barely lags (actually it looks like you're using a Windows Phone!), it's only a bit slow when it has to install big apps because Art has to compile the APK and it's a process CPU dependent.
It's a very AOSP rom with only additional stuff to support the Mediatek soc (HotKnot, audio enhancements that I suggest you to keep disabled, smart gestures, smart wake-up, MiraVision). Unluckily such changes bring some cosmetic issues like the one you can observe here:
where they should have used a white icon... anyway it's just a cosmetic detail that cwon't affect user experience (unless you have OCD, lol).
The rom uses a traditional launcher with the drawer but I replaced it with Nova and its integrated Lollipop icon theme as I didn't like the stock one.
The 2GB of ram are enough and the OS handles it much better than 5.0, most of the times I have more than 900MB free while running a browser with 5 tabs opened (Firefox) and many other apps in the background.
It looks like that under the sticker there's reported a less capable battery than what's advertised... I don't understand such things, just be honest, specially considering that with my usage (WiFi/BT/GPS always on, 2 gmail accounts and 1 exchange account in push, social networks, instant messaging, browsing, everything but gaming practically) I cover perfectly a day from morning to late night with 4.30/5 hours of display on stats (and my battery has still to give its best since it's new) so there would have been no reason to lie as the overall device specs are enough for the real battery amperage.
Root access
Usually Mediatek devices come rooted out of the factory with a SuperUser toggle to enable in the security settings, this device does not but I found a way to flash SuperSU using the stock recovery.
This process has been tested but it might soft brick your phone and, as of today, there is no FlashTool flashable rom that will recover a device from such brick state.
Anyway, if you feel brave enough, download this zip (please don't re-host it or alter the link as I would like to track down the download statistics) and copy it to your MicroSD card.
Power off the device and turn it on keeping VOL+ and Power until you see some tiny text.
Select the first option (Recovery mode), use VOL+ to navigate and VOL- to confirm.
Once booted to stock recovery select "apply update from sdcard" using VOL+/- to navigate and POWER to confirm, and select the zip file you copied to the MicroSD.
After the flash has completed you will be back to recovery's main screen and just select "reboot system now".
PS: this zip file should work with any MT67** device running a stock Mediatek recovery
PPS: DO NOT apply any incremental ota update after flashing the root zip, flash ONLY flash tool roms when and if they will be available
Conclusions
The only things that I didn't like so far are the lack of a notification LED and the speaker audio volume that once disabled the enhancer sounds quiter (but much better), you have to consider that we are speaking of a device that costs 110/120$ and you can't pretend the same quality as devices at least twice more expensive.
The device itself doesn't look cheap at all, the rom doesn't have noticeable bugs and is updated to the latest Android OS.
WiFi and phone signal quality are above the average of the Chinese devices I have tried so far and if you travel you can get a signal pretty much everywhere!
If you are a mobile gamer I would buy something else but if you just want a good looking phone with good ergonomics, a decent camera and at an affordable price I would definitely consider this one.
Thanks again to GearBest for giving me the opportunity to try this phone and write this review.
