Yota Devices YotaPhone Next

Review

Multimedia

In YotaPhone 2 the multimedia capabilities are not the most important, still the smartphone works really well while playing music, watching movies or editing photos. The speaker does not have an optimal localization (the lower edge of the phone), but when it comes to the quality and loudness it works decently. Audio files will be played by Google’s Music app; there is an FM radio (recording auditions to 3GPP format) and a recorder (also to the 3GPP format) as well.

The Gallery is responsible for viewing photos and editing them. It allows to sort photos by albums, localization or time, share them. It allows to edit them in a simple way, like adding colourful effects or frames. The Gallery is responsible for playing movies as well.

Camera

YotaPhone 2 offers an 8-megapixel main camera – I expected a more impressive matrix, especially that flagships from the competition have cameras with 16-megapixel (Galaxy S5), or even 20.7-megapixel (Xperia Z3). But the quantity of pixels does not always reflects the quality of photos – in the Russian product it is satisfactory. But the thing is that similar results can be achieved with a smartphone for less than 240 euros – in a smartphone that costs almost three times as much as this the camera should be much better. Biggest disadvantages of YotaPhone 2 are setting the white balance and problems with focus in close-ups.

When it comes to settings the camera looks rather modest – the system app offers spherical photos, panoramic ones, photos with the effect of lens blur, a typical auto-mode with the HDR mode and a timer and a camera for recording videos. We will not find any colours effect nor more advanced manual settings.

Sample photos using the Blur effect:

Sample panoramic photos:

And sample auto-mode photos:

The main camera allows to record videos in 1080p resolution. At the front we have a 2-megapixel camera for videocalls (but not by the mobile network) and for selfies. For them, however, we can use the better 8-megapixel camera, viewing the image on the e-paper display.

Source: GSMchoice.com

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