Starmobile has been cruising the atmosphere with a few new handsets in their pockets, one in particular that apparently found its way on our possession is the Starmobile Mobile Up Ultra.
With that in mind, we took our time with the handset and conducted a comprehensive and diverse review on the said Starmobile handset. Find out what kind of stuff we found on this not-so-budget handset from Starmobile.
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Table of Contents
Unboxing – What’s on the retail box of the Starmobile Up Ultra
The retail box that we had was a Smart super pack that carried a blue variant of the Starmobile Up Ultra, a Smart Super Pack LTE SIM, instruction manuals, headphones, USB data cable, screen protector and a 2A 5V power adapter. The Smart Super Pack LTE SIM features free 6 months of iFlix and Php4000 worth of free data for all your social media needs.
- Starmobile Up Ultra blue variant
- Smart Super Pack LTE SIM
- Instruction manuals
- Headphones
- USB data Cable
- 2A 5V power adapter
- Screen Protector
Design and build
The Starmobile Up Ultra holds a very simple and vanilla feel in design. it didn’t exactly felt premium-like and wasn’t exactly that appealing in the design department. The Starmobile Up Ultra has a very standard polycarbonate back, which was specifically designed to be rugged.
The overall design was just way too simple, it felt as if the device itself is good from first glance, but simply doesn’t look anything special. It’s normal to look, however, seems to be one of it’s valued strong points since some people would prepare a vanilla-looking handset than a snazzy looking handset that wouldn’t even be that effective
And thanks to its ruggedness, the Starmobile Up Ultra’s feel was really good and developed a pretty good feeling when being held upon. Its size is also a huge factor in bringing in an overall easy-to-handle feel on the device.
Display and viewing experience
The Starmobile Up Ultra packs a 5.5-inch 720p IPS HD display, which looks pretty decent at first glance but doesn’t seem to to be anything special. There isn’t anything special on the display’s quality, with the latter almost providing a rather decent brightest level, with an oh so simple display clearness quality.
Colour reproduction is a bit impressive, though, especially when looking on certain images on the display. Colour was really satisfactorily, in terms of colour accuracy and white balance, though it still lacks anything that will leave us a strong impression of the device.
Camera Shooting
The Starmobile Up Ultra has a pretty standard yet decent pairing of shooters, thanks to its 13MP BSI, Samsung rear shooter and its 5MP BSI selfie shooter. It packs a pretty decently acceptable quality in all its shots, which is pretty impressive to say the least.
In still image daylight shooting, the Starmobile Up Ultra provided some pretty decently coloured outputs, which greatly increased the effectiveness of its still image outputs. However, upon closer inspection, we’ve determined that it was rather unclear when you get up close and personal with the shots.
For night still image shooting, the Up Ultra delivered rather blurry and unimpressive outputs. It was obvious that the shots become really weary of the change of lighting and were able to perform lesser, quality-wise. Brightness on shots though was still impressive overall, despite being under a low-lit situation.
On Selfie shooting, the Up Ultra performed quite admirably, thanks to its better blending of white balance and colour saturation, making the output a bit life-like that expected, however, again, the outputs were a bit grainy upon zooming in on our selfie outputs.
The Up Ultra had a very decent performance in video, despite delivering a rather satisfactorily 1080p video quality, the Up Ultra simply lacked the finesse in the surprise department, it was simply a decent video shooter, but nothing more.
Performance and benchmarks
Starmobile Up Ultra carries around an MT6735 processor, it holds 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage, backed up by a Mali-T720 GPU on its pocket. It’s system specs is rather standard as it is, which isn’t much of a surprise.
Getting up close and personal with certain apps through the use of the Up Ultra was seen to be a bit weary, thanks to certain random lags here and there whenever I’m playing a game or browsing around. This becomes frequent, which was slowly becoming an annoyance.
Benchmark scores:
- AnTuTu rating – 32777
- Geekbench 3 rating – single: 426, multi: 1246
- Basemark OS II rating – 493
Software experience
The handset packs and Android 5.1 Lollipop, with stock Android custom home screen. The home screen was rather straight-to-the-point and minimalistic at its own right, though as mentioned in many parts of this review, it didn’t deliver anything surprising or interesting for that matter.
The delay that was felt while browsing around the phone’s function or swiping here and there was a problem that really bothered us, however, since it frequently happened and we simply tried a few ways here and there to lessen it up, to no avail.
Battery Performance
The Starmobile Up Ultra packs a 2500mAh removable battery on its back, which is quite convenient. The charger is USB port capable and is abruptly something that was really actually quite good on the handset.
Speaker and audio quality
The speaker of the Up Ultra is conveniently located on the bottom part of the handset. To us, it was perfectly placed their to maximise the generated sound, which was by far a good call by Starmobile as a whole.
Despite its bottom speaker being perfectly placed, the sound output wasn’t that strong in the volume department, while quality was actually there to begin with. Volume was rather unimpressive, since even at maximum volume, it felt as if it wasn’t at its loudest, while quality-wise, it was rather acceptable.
Price and verdict
From our in-depth Starmobile Up Ultra review, we were able to determine that the Php6,490 super pack price range was rather a bit up there. For an almost Php6,500 handset, it wasn’t as remarkable as we expected it to be, but the LTE SIM offering from Smart sounds like a good offer at first glance.
The handset was recently released in PH backed on December 2015 and is currently available at any Starmobile Philippines stores and Smart Philippines Branches nationwide. Overall, the offering doesn’t have bad, despite the handset lacking in any surprises whatsoever, other options such as Lenovo’s Vibe S1 could rather be a better option, though, with adding up a few bucks for an overall better specs list.
What we liked on the Starmobile Up Ultra
- Decent display
- Excellent colorization in still image
- Pretty good sound quality
- Admirable selfie outputs
- Acceptable Video
What we didn’t like on the Starmobile Up Ultra
- Unimpressive exterior design
- Wishy-washy brightness level in display
- Blurry and grainy outputs
- Laggy when browsing the phone
- Laggy when using certain apps
- Not-so-loud speaker
Starmobile Up Ultra specs, PH price, features
- Display: 5.5-inch 720p IPS HD display
- Chipset: MediaTek MT6735 chip
- RAM: 2GB of RAM
- Memory: 16GB of ROM
- Camera: 13MP rear shooter, AF, BSI, Samsung sensor + 5MP selfie shooter, BSI
- Connectivity: 3G LTE, WiFi n, BT 4.0, GPS
- OS: Android 5.1 Lollipop
- Battery: 2500mAh battery capacity
- Release Date: December 2015
- Official price: Php6,490
