India is one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the world, and Micromax — a relatively unknown brand outside of Asia — is the number one smartphone vendor in the country. The company is known for selling re-branded Chinese phones at a fairly attractive price.

While the strategy is not exactly commendable, it has worked extremely well for the company. Despite all its success though, Micromax devices are not really reliable, and users have frequently complained about the lack of updates and poor after-sales experience.

With Yu, Micromax is looking to create a secondary brand aimed at enthusiasts under which it hopes to fix the mistakes it has made under its primary brand.

While the company’s first handset under its Yu brand — the Yureka — is still a rebranded Coolpad F2 4G from a Chinese company, it comes with CyanogenMod 11S, instead of Micromax’s own UI — which in itself makes the handset worthy enough for a look. After all, why would Cyanogen Inc. — made by the founders of the CyanogenMod ROM — share their OS with a relatively unknown company?

Build Quality

Despite its origins from a hardly known Chinese brand, the build quality of the Yu Yureka is surprisingly very good. In fact, it is even better than majority of other offerings from Micromax in the same or higher price range.

The back of the Yu Yureka is made of a soft touch plastic with a matte finish. While not a fingerprint magnet, the back does attract a lot of dust and can easily pick up scratches and oil from your skin over longer periods of time.

The Volume buttons are located on the left side of the handset, while the Power key is located on the right. The microUSB port is located on the bottom with a microphone hole nearby, and the 3.5mm jack is located on the top.

The front of the Yureka is dominated by a 5.5-inch 720p IPS display, which is protected by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3. The capacitive navigation keys — Menu, Home and Back — are located below the display. The home button is visible even when the backlight turned off, while the back and menu button are completely invisible when the backlit off. Since the home button has an iPhone 4/4s like look to it, the Yureka might look like an iPhone clone to many from a distance.

Overall though, the Yu Yureka sports an impressive build quality, which can easily rival Android phones that are priced way higher than it.

Display

The front of the Yureka is dominated by a 5.5-inch 720p IPS  display, which offers a fairly decent level of brightness and contrast. The viewing angles are also pretty good with everything remaining eligible on the display. However, there is a strong blue tinge on the display when its viewed  from anywhere except head on.  Another gripe with the display is its poor eligibility under strong sunlight, where even after bumping the brightness to the maximum and squinting my eyes, I could barely make out anything that was being displayed on the screen.

There were no touchscreen performance issues with the display on the Yureka, and pinch-to-zoom and other gestures worked perfectly in Google Maps, Chrome and other apps.

Software

After the OnePlus One, the Yu Yureka is the second handset to run on CyanogenMod 11S — a slightly beefed up version of the popular CyanogenMod 11 custom ROM — which is also the reason why the handset is receiving so much limelight from the (Indian) media.

While CyanogenMod 11S on the Yureka packs all the customization features that we have already seen on the OnePlus One, the system icons and interface look slightly different on both devices from each other. This is largely due to the Theme Engine present in CyanogenMod 11, which Micromax/Yu has taken advantage of to give the OS a distinct look of its own with their own theme.

If you are not a fan of the theme used by Micromax on the Yureka though, you can always revert back to the stock KitKat look, or even switch to the Hexo theme, which is the default theme that CM11S ships with on the OnePlus One.

CM11S comes with a plethora of features and customisations that will suffice the needs of even the most hardcore of users out there. Compared to the usual flavour of CyanogenMod 11, CM11S on the Yureka comes with a number of new features, some of which have been listed below:

1) Double-tap to wake/sleep: Allows you to wake the Yureka by simply double tapping on the screen when the screen is switched off. Similarly, you can double tap the status bar from anywhere to switch off the display.

2) AudioFX: A system wide equalizer to improve the music experience.

3) Baton: Baton brings iOS 8’s Continuity feature to CyanogenMod. The company had teased Baton integration into its ROM late last year, but the Yureka is the first consumer handset to ship with this feature. Baton allows you to instantly sync over your app data between your various Android devices, so you can seamlessly switch between them without worrying about losing your progress.

Since the feature relies on a system framework, it does not require any additional modification on the application.

3) CameraNext: CyanogenMod’s own camera app that is vastly superior to Google Camera or the AOSP camera for that matter.

In terms of customization, CM11S offers so many options that it is impractical to cover all of them in this review. Since CM11S is based on CM11 itself, make sure to read our CyanogenMod 11 Features Walkthrough article to know about all the features present on the Yureka.

In case you just want a quick rundown of all the customisation features present in CM11S, check out the list below:

• Quick Tiles customisation
• Heads Up Notification
• Ability to toggle between on-screen and hardware navigation keys
• System wide Theme engine
• Profiles
• Permissions Manager
• Lock screen shortcuts
• Status bar customisation

You can read an in-depth feature walkthrough of CyanogenMod 11 here.

Camera

The Yureka comes with a 13MP rear camera aided by an LED flash, and a 5MP front facing shooter. The rear camera is capable of recording Full HD videos in 1080p resolution, which is pretty impressive especially when you consider the price of the handset.

On the software side, Cyanogen’s CameraNext app does all the heavy duty. The interface is similar to the camera app from the OnePlus One, and sadly, suffers from the same basic issues as well.

While the app comes with a plethora of scenes, it allows users to select the ones they want to use frequently. Users can then switch between them by swiping left or right from the viewfinder, which quickly becomes cumbersome and tiring if you have a lot of scenes enabled.

The camera app does not open up quickly, but its not excruciatingly slow as well. It does make up for this by offering plenty of customisation options, including the ability to select the codec in which the videos will be recorded and more. Sadly through, the app does not offer manual control over some of the camera’s aspects, including ISO and shutter speed. While most users will not care about them, CyanogenMod is aimed towards enthusiasts who would like granular controls over the camera.

As for the camera performance itself, the Yureka’s 13MP rear snapper performs decently in daylight, but produces absolutely disastrous results in low-light with noise ruining the clicked image. The sensor was pretty quick to focus on subjects in daylight, but struggled as the amount of light reduced. The shot to shot time between images is acceptable as well.

You can check out some camera samples from the Yu Yureka’s camera below.

Click on the images above to view them at full-size.

Performance

Under the hood, the Yu Yureka comes with a Snapdragon 615 chipset. The latest generation mid-range chip from Qualcomm is based on ARM’s v8 64-bit architecture and comprises of eight ARM cores in big.LITTLE architecture, which consists of 4 x Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1GHz and 4 x Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.7GHz. The combination of the lower and higher clocked A53 cores help the Snapdragon 615 in delivering the best of both worlds — performance and battery life. The handset also comes with an Adreno 405 GPU and 2GB RAM.

Thanks to a relatively stock build of Android and a powerful mid-range SoC, the Yu Yureka is an impressive performer. Normal day-to-day browsing on the handset is extremely smooth without any hint of lag or stutter. It is only under load that the device shows symptoms of struggling, but that is more likely due to a slow NAND chip rather than the processor being unable to keep up with the load. Even while playing heavy games like Asphalt 8 and Modern Combat, the Yureka did not break into a sweat. While the device did get a little warm, it was nothing to worry about.

Battery Life and Conclusion

The Yureka comes with a 2500mAh battery, which is more than enough for the handset to last a day of heavy usage. Even when I pushed the Yureka hard by playing games and browsing websites for hours on a 3G connection, the handset was able to make it through the day. On a regular basis, I was able to squeeze screen-on time of roughly 4-5 hours from the handset without optimizing the phone’s settings. Since the Yureka does not feature Quick Charge 2.0 technology, it takes its own sweet time to go from 0-100%, which is roughly around 2.2 hours.

Overall, the Yu Yureka is an impressive product from Micromax’s stable. The handset is a winner because of its software, which is successfully able to take advantage of the powerful hardware present inside it. My only gripe with the Yureka is its poor camera, but I guess that can be ignored once you consider that the handset is being sold for only Rs. 9,999 in India. Another possible issue with the handset is its limited availability, since for some strange reason Micromax has implemented a flash sale mechanism to sell the device. It is likely that the company is doing this to create hype and artificial demand around the handset.

Yu Yureka is available exclusively on Amazon India for Rs. 9,999 every Tuesday through a flash sale.