Wiko Ufeel Prime review — quite the upgrade!

We have already gone through two Wiko devices, both from the Ufeel line-up. The Wiko Ufeel Go and Ufeel Fab were both budget devices, staying affordable to appeal to the masses. I must mention that the Wiko Ufeel Prime is still very affordable, being well below the RM1000 mark. Let’s see what Wiko managed to do with the extra headroom available when designing Wiko Ufeel Prime.

Unboxing

The Wiko Ufeel Prime comes in a turquiose box. The front of the packaging is quite a fair bit fancier than the competition, probably to appeal more to the younger generation.

You will find the device wrapped in a frosted plastic wrapper as soon as you lift the lid of the packaging. There is a whole compartment of accessories beside where the device lies, and still more under it. Which brings us to the next section…

The Wiko Ufeel Prime comes with some of the most comprehensive package I have seen for some time! You get the standard issue charger and microUSB cable, but Wiko has gone the extra mile by providing a soft clear case, plastic screen protector and even SIM adapters.

This is the first time I have seen a SIM ejector pin come with its very own rubber protector! The SIM adapters are useless for this device, as it uses nanoSIMs.

Appearance

The Wiko Ufeel Prime has quite substantial bezels on the top and bottom to make space for the fingerprint sensor. The front camera here is an 8MP one with a LED flash, so selfie users should be able to get a kick out of it. The 5.0″ display seems a little small in this day and age, but I am sure there are those who will appreciate it.

The back of the device looks familiar, having a look shared with a lot of smartphones in the market. Unlike the previous Wiko devices that we have reviewed here, the sticker here mars the clean look of the device, and it doesn’t seem like it will be easily removed.

Along with the microUSB port on the bottom of the device are the primary microphone and loudspeaker, hidden behind symmetrical grilles for aesthetic purposes.

Buttons are on the right, where they are usually found. The buttons here are not textured, which was quite surprising since their lower end device had a nice textured power button.

The 3.5mm jack finds itself on the top of the device, with the secondary microphone beside the camera.

Specifications

Performance

The Snapdragon 430 packs eight A53 cores clocked at up to 1.4 GHz. This does not make it the fastest chipset around but the Wiko Ufeel Prime does pair it with 4GB of RAM so it should be capable of providing a decent user experience. Before we go to that, let’s take a look at the benchmark scores.

Here it scores a bit better than the ASUS ZenFone 3 Laser which sports the same Snapdragon 430 and 4GB of RAM. It does trail the Honor 6X by a considerable margin, simply due to the fact that the Kirin 655 offers a better GPU and also has the A53 cores clocked much higher.

PCMark Work benchmark tests the performance of the device in workloads like web browsing, video editing, writing, photo editing and data manipulation, which is pretty much all the productivity you can do on a smartphone. It makes a decent showing here.

The pure CPU performance of the CPU part of the Snapdragon 430 is tested in Geekbench, and it performs as expected.

Here in 3DMark we see the Snapdragon 430 having nearly triple the performance of the MTK6735 found in the Wiko Ufeel Fab. Mobile gamers will definitely find the Wiko Ufeel Prime to be a lot more satisfactory than the lower end models.

Despite Wiko being able to cram 4000 mAh batteries in the Wiko Ufeel Go which featured a similar 5.0″ screen, they oddly decided to pack a smaller battery in the Wiko Ufeel Prime which actually features a more powerful chipset. As a result, the battery life figures here are poorer than its weaker brethren.

In normal usage, the Wiko Ufeel Prime doesn’t do that poorly, with 4 hours of screen on time in over a day of usage, which is good enough for me. Given that we have a full octa-core CPU, 1080p display all running off a standard 3000 mAh battery, these numbers are really good.

User Experience

Hardware

The Wiko Ufeel Prime supports two SIMs, but sadly unlike its two brethren, it does not support true dual-SIM functionality, instead going for what a lot of other smartphones offer: an option to use two SIMs and no microSD card or one SIM and a microSD card. I must say I am quite disappointed to see this here as they had such a nice track record of offering real dual SIM support.

I don’t really enjoy having the fingerprint sensor on the front, but the one here has quite a few neat tricks up its sleeve. You can swipe it to emulate the back navigation key, double tap or long press to bring up the app switcher and tap it to go home. While its nice and dandy, and you may be able to get by without a navigation bar on the screen, until you want to use Google Assistant. For some reason, you can’t open Google without the on-screen navbar, which makes all these cool gestures Wiko baked into the fingerprint sensor moot. That isn’t the end of it though, as Wiko also allows you to immediately go to an app from sleep by unlocking it with different fingers.

The rather tiny 5.0″ display panel makes it easy to hold, but it really feels a bit too small when compared against the competition nowadays. It is very easy to carry around and use with one hand, which comes really handy (is this a pun? I have no idea) when out and about.

With that said, the 1080p IPS panel here is quite sharp, with a PPI count of 441. Colors are vivid, and the display goes quite bright, up to 460 nits to be exact. Full lamination means there won’t be internal reflections ruining your view under direct sunlight.

The loudspeaker in the Wiko Ufeel Prime is decently loud, but does not reproduce bass and will suffer from distortion when playing higher frequencies. Once again, this is a loudspeaker meant for notifications, not for sharing music with friends. Keep to that, and you should be fine

Camera

The rear camera is a 13MP Sony IMX258 behind a f/2.2 5P lens with a blue light filter, and is aided by a dual LED flash. You can take up to 1080p videos with the Wiko Ufeel Prime, which is a step up from their lower end models that were limited to 720p. A professional mode offers some added control, but the shutter speed control is still missing here. The front camera also sees an upgrade with an 8MP sensor, also aided by a single LED flash.

The image quality out of the rear camera is decent, and HDR mode gives the images a very interesting look, really widening the dynamic range of your shots. However it does have the downside of taking some time to process and also softer details that is noticeable when you zoom in. Otherwise, it is a mode I would gladly play around with. The 8MP camera in front gives decent images, but it will be rather grainy when taking shots indoors.

Software

The Wiko Ufeel Prime packs an almost-stock Android 6.0 Marshmallow UI, with the addition of some minor tweaks to make it unique. A weird addition to their stock UI is a shortcut to the app drawer, when all the apps’ icons are on the homescreen and cannot be removed without uninstalling the apps. I have no idea why they did it. You get a gestures panel when you swipe down from the left corner, which allows you to program gestures to quickly open your apps or dial contacts. An addition that was not available in the other Ufeel devices is a smart left panel, offering you last used contacts, frequently used apps as well as a news feed by News Republic.

Just like its entry level brethren, there are redundant apps lying around here in the Wiko Ufeel Prime. There is quite a selection of in-house apps as well as a selection of Google apps here, which are system apps and cannot be uninstalled without rooting the device. Bloatware comes in the form of 360 Security, News Republic and Zenly, which thankfully can be uninstalled. The Snapdragon 430 and 4GB of RAM does offer enough oomph to keep things running along quite smoothly, and I did not suffer fromlag nd  no complaints when I used it as my daily driver for a week.

Conclusion

The Wiko Ufeel Prime is a great device, and does justify its higher price tag compared to the Ufeel Fab and Ufeel Go. At RM899 you get a smartphone that has a Snapdragon chipset, 4GB of RAM and a pretty decent camera. The near-stock Android Marshmallow UI is great, and the fingerprint sensor is also quite fast, making this device a very acceptable choice. The small screen size may be a downer for some, but if you prefer smaller devices, this is definitely one to consider.