Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsUmidigi continues delivering high quality phones at value prices
Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2023
My wife was due for an upgrade from her 2022 Bison since the GPS chip has been on the fritz for a while.
We transitioned to an Umidigi family around 2020, after using Zenfones for several generations prior to that. Those first few Umidigi devices we had blew me away at how good they were for the price. They were a full step above the Zenfones at the same price point. Their design philosophy seemed pretty consistent: package a snappy mediatek SoC with an adequate amount of RAM, a big bright vibrant screen, and a robust battery into a budget-priced device.
I am still using my Power 3 and will as long as I'm able to. It still goes for days between charges and I have learned to replace screens to keep it going (on screen 3 right now). My kids have had A9 Pros for two years now and they've been surprisingly durable considering they've stood up to tween abuse. My wife's Bison served her very well until the GPS started acting up. That, along with the Bison I had for a while that drowned, have been the only points of failure we've experienced with their hardware.
She's been using the A15c for a little over a month now and we thought we'd share her experiences. First off, the battery. As usual with Umidigi devices, it comes with a large capacity battery that is the real deal. Maybe not quite as beefy as the 6300mah battery in my Power 3, but still good enough to go a full day of her pretty intensive use and still have a decent amount of battery life left.
Let me explain further, one day of use for my wife would probably be two or three days of use for me. She says the A15c is a little better than her Bison, which was making it about 14-15 hours before needing to be charged. Since we switched her over to this phone, I charged up her old phone and had it sitting next to me. It went at least 7 days before the battery finally died (I kept getting notifications on it for our doorbell).
There are two areas where I believe Umidigi are easily the segment leaders for Android phones. One is battery life, the other is screen quality. Their screens are always plenty bright for outdoor use and look great. This device is no exception. They are getting bigger and bigger. This one is probably 4-5mm bigger than the Bison, which already had a largish screen. We're approaching phablet territory. My wife hasn't complained about the size, but very much bigger and they'll probably stop fitting in mom-jean back pockets.
Everything else is working as expected. The T606 processor is fast enough for smart phone stuff and seems to do pretty good with regard to battery life. The NFC and GPS work as you'd expect. No problem getting quick locks for GPS navigation. Verizon and Mint both go up to 25-30mbps lte service in my area on this device (EDIT - so, data works with an activated Verizon sim card, HOWEVER, you cannot make or receive phone calls due to the Unisec processor not being provisioned for VoLTE support.) I didn't rate it on face recognition since we don't utilize that feature as the extra drain it puts on batteries aren't worth it in our opinion, but we did test it and it seemed to work fine. The fingerprint sensor on the power button works great.
I haven't had a chance to try to tweak the settings on the camera, which has been my wife's biggest complaint. She isn't happy with the quality of low light photos and videos at the moment. I went through some of what she's captured and there is definitely some graininess and noticeable lack of image stabilization. This might be one area where this device is a step back from the Bison, which had a pretty adequate camera. Just making some changes to the camera settings may alleviate some of the problems she has experienced.
My only personal gripe about this device/listing is that they're misrepresenting it as having 16gb of RAM. It has 8gb of RAM and it has a linux kernel (All androids run on top of linux) with zram enabled which compresses data going into and decompresses data coming out of RAM. It isn't a gimmick, it really does work well for devices with low RAM since it's a lot faster than swap, but it's not RAM and shouldn't be advertised as such. Honestly representing what you're selling is important for long-term success in the US, in my opinion, and they have worthy products.
In summary, I think you'd be very hard pressed to find a better brand new Android phone at this price point.