The UMIDIGI Z2: A Hands-On Review and Unboxing

As I take the UMIDIGI Z2 out of its box, I'm immediately struck by its premium feel. The phone's body is made of metal, giving it a solid and sturdy construction that's pleasing to hold. The back of the phone features dual cameras, which are likely to be a major selling point for this device. However, upon closer inspection, I notice that there's no prominent camera lens or any other visual indicators to suggest what these cameras can do.

In fact, one of the key features advertised on the UMIDIGI website is the ability to take bokeh effect photos using the dual cameras. Unfortunately, it seems this feature is not yet available on the phone at the time of my review. Instead, I see that the settings menu offers a picture size of up to 16 megapixels, but there's no option to swap between different camera modes or adjust the ISO. This lack of flexibility is disappointing, and I hope that a firmware update will soon bring this feature online.

Moving on to the rear camera, which can shoot in 1080p at maximum quality without electronic image stabilization. The camera app itself looks clean and modern, but the screen doesn't display any information about what's being captured - it's simply a blank slate with some basic controls scattered around the edges. The front-facing camera, on the other hand, can also record in 1080p and appears to have a decent quality sensor, although I couldn't say for certain without taking a closer look.

When using the UMIDIGI Z2 as a video recording device, it's clear that this phone is capable of producing some very smooth footage. The screen displays a bright and vibrant color scheme, which is always a pleasure to watch. However, there are a few limitations to be aware of - for example, you can't shoot in 4K resolution at the moment, although I suspect that will change with future firmware updates.

In terms of performance, the UMIDIGI Z2 is quick and responsive, making it feel very snappy and smooth. The screen itself is another major plus point, as it's bright and clear and makes viewing videos or browsing the web a delight. Global LTE support also means that this phone will work seamlessly in most parts of the world.

However, there are a few areas where the UMIDIGI Z2 falls short. For example, the speaker performance is not the strongest, and I struggled to hear certain voices or sounds over the background noise. Additionally, notifications can be a bit tricky to navigate - for instance, if you're in an app, you won't see any new notifications until you swipe down from the top of the screen.

One final issue that caught my eye was the absence of a status LED on this phone. There's no little red light or indicator that lets you know when it's charging or when there are low battery levels - instead, you have to rely on checking the screen for these clues. This is a minor annoyance, but one that I hope UMIDIGI will address in future updates.

Finally, let's talk about battery life and charging speed. According to my testing, the phone lasts around 7-8 hours of continuous use before needing to be recharged - this is a solid performance, although not exceptional. However, charging times are surprisingly quick, with the included charger getting the phone fully juiced up in just over an hour.

Overall, I'm pleased to have had the opportunity to review and unbox the UMIDIGI Z2. While there are a few areas where it falls short - particularly when it comes to camera features or speaker performance - this is still a very solid device that's well worth considering for anyone looking for a budget-friendly Android phone. With a bit of tweaking and refinement, I'm confident that UMIDIGI will be able to push this phone to new heights and make it an even more formidable competitor in the market.

One final point to note is that there are other mobile phones available in the same price category as the UMIDIGI Z2 that offer some additional features. For example, the Redmi Note 5 has built-in electronic image stabilization support with the help of an app like Open Camera. This adds a few extra dollars to the price, but it's definitely worth considering for anyone looking for a more feature-rich phone in this class.

In conclusion, the UMIDIGI Z2 is a solid and well-built Android phone that offers many positive features at a budget-friendly price. While there are a few areas where it could be improved - particularly when it comes to camera performance or speaker quality - I'm overall very pleased with this device.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enHi guys Chris here back checking outanother brand of mobile phones so thisis UMIDIGI's Z2 that was justreleased here so this is powered by theMediatek p23 that's an Ccta-core CPUit's paired up with six gigabytes of RAMa 64 gigabyte rom it runs Android 8.1 ithas a notch display on here so if you'reafter that new somewhat questionabletrend then this has of course got thaton there so the earpiece will be alittle bit smaller and it does have dualcameras on the front so we've got onethat's 16 the other is 8 and the sameexact setup on the rear so one is 16 8 F2.0 aperture how you me did you claimthey are using Sony sensors they'recurved glass rear and a metal bodyaround the outside of the frame of it soit should hopefully have a really goodbuild quality the battery capacity is3850 milliamp hours and the display isthat full HD plus because of the notchit's a little bit of an odd resolutionso it's 2246by 1080 now it does have 18 what quickcharge as well with this dual SIMsupport so we have a rather plainlooking black box here on the back of ityou can see it's just listing thosespecs here so if you want to know theLTE band support you can see that rightthere so it does cover band 20 in factit's got global band support which isgreat for a phone of this price ofcourse so I can see the phone or has acase on it which is good to see moremanufacturers doing this including casesso this is a textured matte rubber whichis good it'll give it a little bit moregrip to it obviously when your hands arecold and dry phones can be very slipperyconsidering this also has glass on therear it does cover the volume up anddown and the power button here which isgood that case but I will just put thatphone to the side there for a minute andwe'll take a look at what else we get soI've got this little leaflet here thisis just saying thank you for choosingume digi so that'll be warranty cardinstructions and all that the SIM traytool right here and then we do have aredtype-c cable and this right here ofcourse is what we're going to need foraudio so that's all types e2 3.5millimeter adapterunfortunately no 3.5 millimeter supporton this model and then our media techpump Express charger the maximum outputof this one is 12 volts 1.5 amps and youcan see it is a EU plug so the z2 weighsa hundred and sixty eight grams andcomes in at nine millimeters thick so itdoes come with this pre-applied screenprotector out of the box taking a lookat this wide notch we have here sothat's the first thing that strikes youwhen you look at the phone we do have2.5 D rounded glass corners here whichit has the manufacturer claims GorillaGlass two front facing cameras so once16 megapixels obviously the larger onethere then the 8 megapixel is the one tothe right of it now the earpiece you cansee is very small that is about half thesize of your typical earpiece hopefullythis is not going to affect call qualityI will have to test that out and then tothe left of the earpiece right here wehave an ambient light sensor and aproximity sensor now your energy ontheir webpage are saying they advertiselike 3d face unlocking tracking but it'snot using actual proper 3d mapping arethings like the what the iPhone 10 hasno that's really kind of falseadvertising there because it's justusing your typical Android 2d faceunlocking now on the rear you'll seewe've got two dual tone LED flash andother two cameras rear round fingerprintreader now these cameras again it's thesame setup as the front so and if 2.0aperture 16 and 8 megapixels you can seethat we also have curved glass with theedge along here which is a nice touch ithas quite a bit of a Samsung feel to itand why I say that is it's just thedesign of it so we've got the middleframe around the outside on theleft-hand side here you can see there'sour sim tray so that will take either aa nano sim and micro sim or nano plusmicro isECAD you can see some antenna linesthere so top and bottom and the middlegoes around and we have a speaker grilleat the bottom so obviously there's goingto be one speaker in here the mic andthen a type C port up the top secondarymicrophone that has it so there is no IRtransmitter with this one and we don'thave a 3.5 millimeter headphone jacksadly so the buttons are on theright-hand side we've got the powervolume up and down and they are made outof metal and they do have a good feel tothem so their build quality for a twohundred and fifty dollar u.s. phone Ifeel is good it's very good it feelsnice in hand the weight isn't too badand neither is really the thickness timeto power it up now and we'll take a lookat that display so you me digi thereit's an IPS panel the resolutions twentyto forty six by 1080 and it is runningstock Android 8.1 I hope they haven'tput any bloatware on this so I just hadto tone down the ISO settings with mycamera because of course when you firstput this up they put the screen intobasically like a full brightness it'sset on full brightness at the moment Ibelieve and here we have obviously agood look at the knotch and the bezelsside bezels aren't bad at all there westill have quite a bit of a chin here sothe bottom bezel is large and you'restill quite a large top bezel there eventhough we have the notch so we gothrough setup here very quick in factI'll skip ahead with this because thisis just gonna be a standard eightAndroid 8.1 setup okay so here we go onthe ROM so I went through the typicalsetup of Android 8.1 added myfingerprint and just put my credentialsin there for Google Play Store so youcan see it is here now have a look atthe stock apps we've got onboard sothere are quite a few there I guessthey've added a lot of you could sayGoogle's bloat but there is a good thinghere that we're not seeing any unwantedkind of Chinese bloat or applicationsthat aren't even relevant to literallyanyone that isn't of course living inChina so that's not there which is goodto see FM radio so we do have hardwareFM radio actually that's the first timeI've seen it were the only a type C portso obviously they've wired it through itsee other manufacturers haven't evenbothered to do that for example withShomi phones they when they had a tightsupport they normally drop FM radiohardware tuner support so I have a lookand see what version here it is runningso it's Android 8.1 but the patch levelis May the fifth so that's anotherpositive there that's recent that isgood to see and I don't believe thereare any Wireless updates but I willcheck right now no at the time of thisvideo I'm on the current software sothat some trade correction here willtake to nano Sims or a nano sim andmicro sd card the frame around it isreinforced with the middle as well whichis good now to demonstrate thefingerprint reader I find it to be alittle bit slow actually so it isn'talways on one place my finger there andyou can see it just comes on so it willtake about two seconds there so one twoyeah one and a half second so it's notthe fastest now taking a look at thedisplay so the gamma checks out to beapproximately around 2.3 and it is anIPS so the viewing angle 0k but Iprobably because of the screenparticular actually that this ishappening but it does shift out todarken a little bit when you look at itat certain angles so not the kind ofviewing angles of course that you'd getfrom say an AMOLED panel but for thisprice range category a mobile phone thedisplay does look good the maximumbrightness of this panel tops out at 450Lux which is not bad the whites are aslight tiny bit cool white there seemsto be no mirror vision application onhere normally it's three displaysettings where you can tweak your whitebalance and that's missing the blackslook okay for an IPS panel colors aswell do look good so all in all this isa decent panel that they have used herethese 6.2 inch IPS now there's oneimportant thing to point out with thenotches and this is happening with allthe knotch phones that I have recentlyreviewed apart from perhaps maybeoneplus because they're not just not sowide but you're missing out on a lot ofI feel key crucial information that youhave with a mobile phone so you can'tsee the battery percent right here andyou have to swipe down and then you'llsee your remaining battery percentnotifications forexample if you're on 4G or not againyou're not gonna see it so you have tobear in mind that when you swap over toa knotch phone that you are going to bemissing out on some of that importantinformation it just cannot be displayedbecause there isn't enough physical roomthere to put it all in a display becauseof the knotch now apart from that hiccupwith the rom the rest of the experienceis quite good it's actually very smoothmultitasking going through selectingyour various different apps that is allquite good of course we've just got theon-screen navigation buttons it doesn'thave a gesture mode with itbut I have noticed that the performanceof the ROM in general really is goodapps install fast moving around isreally quick and of course you can domulti-screen split-screen mode herebecause it is running Android 8 thatcame in with Android 7 so for exampleyou want Play Store here drag that tothe top that'll be at the bottom youwant to load any here's for exampletreble check and then you can see rightthere that both of these are workingwell it does run a little bit slowerthough depending on what apps you'rerunning in the split screen mode but yesperformance good that at least gets athumbs up from me looking now atsynthetic benchmarks this is an - - sothe hello P 23 can get 80,000 and thisone here so that's on par with otherMobile's that run this chipset it'sabout 20,000 points less than the helleox 20 and about 3050 sorry thousandpoints since I a Snapdragon 636 wirelessAC speeds the throughput here connectingup to check out just the maximum I canget so it's not dependent on my actualconnection speed but more the router tothe mobile not so great here so it wasabout a hundred and fifty s than maximumideally I like to see a lot higher thanthis if it's over 300 that's really goodbut this is all the chips it can reallydo so if you have a fast fiber line youcannot take advantage and get reallysuper quick download speeds of thoselarge android games now the GPSperfectly fine here it doesn't lock onto every single satellite that it willsee but the accuracy always hoversaround three and four meters so that'snot a problem and this includes drivingmovingthe car so it's gonna be fine for GPS ofcourse it does have a hardware compassthat is part of the sensors that it hason there and when it comes to 4Gdownload speeds and uploads perfectlyfine I mean I'm with orange and Spainhere and that is about all I can getwhere I'm situated at the moment withany phone so you know this beads arepoor but no issues with the signalstrength either has been good for bothwireless and for 4G so the internalstorage emmc 5.1 spec which is good tosee I half expected to see the olderfour point five point one spec TMC inthis and those are a lot slower so thisis fast of course it's not as fast asufs but for this price range of phonethis is not bad at all triple checkso does it support seamless updates nobecause we don't have access to both ofthe partitions here so that's a littledisappointing to see if it had this itwill be much better for getting updatesand also for things like custom roms andall that and now when it comes to thewide vine support it's a level 3 so whatdoes this jargon mean well that means noNetflix HD no it's just gonna be in yourstandard definitionunfortunately so 1080p YouTube that'snot a problem but the purpose of showingyou this right now is just to give you asample of that loudspeaker which israther loud but it's not super highquality but does the joband checking out gaming performance hereso this is pub G on the medium sittingthat had auto-detected so I've just gonewith this sitting and I have noticedthat from time to time you will get somelag and some stutter but for the mostpart it is actually good it is playableyou can see when i zoom in there withthe scope so that's fine just don'texpect the best performance because itwill be a little bit disappointed withthat from time to time you will seethose legs and those status as mentionedand you will notice too that there isthis odd black bar at the top sosomething's up with that it's obviouslydown to software that you me digi willneed to patch this after 20 minutes ofgaming I have noticed that the phonedoes get quite warm to the touch it getsup to around about 33 34 degrees maximumis what I've seen on the back of thephone taking a look now at the cameraapp so the stock camera app is missingone important feature that wasadvertised on their website that itcould take those bokeh effect photos sowith a blurred backgrounds using thedual cameras but it doesn't seem to bethere so if you swipe up down from thetop sorry you will see that these arethe settings we have here so you're ableto set the picture size up to 16megapixels your ISO there is othersettings but there's nothing there toactually swap that mode over into whatwould probably be in one of these spaceshere would be that settings so theyobviously need to add that with afirmware update it's not available atthe time of my video here so that shouldhopefully the coming soon we do have HDRmode you can see in video mode you canshoot also up to 1080p here that's themaximum and those are the settings thereso video format you can change that overto the dated very dated now 3gp which iwould not recommend using so it's thesample at a front-facing camera canshoot in 1080p maximum and the qualityis alright audio is okay not too bad noelectronic image stabilization so yousee that it won't shake around obviouslygoing to have to use one of thosehandheld mobile gimble's to get steadyfootage withfront facing camera sample footage nowthis is from the rear camera so 1080pmaximum no electronic imagestabilization no 4k 1080p only there areother mobile phones that are actuallycheaper than this one here that canshoot in 4k and suddenly even supportelectronic image stabilization withapplications like open camera so that isan area of disappointment here thissound seems to be alright and you'regetting reasonable 1080p quality herecould perhaps be just a little bitsharper but again we're just lacking outon resolution because it cannot shoot 4kokay so just to recap here we have avery nice build quality here on the z2from ume digi it is really quite goodand it does have a bit of a Samsung kindof look to it the frame they've usedaround their metal volume buttons dualcameras on the rear however at the timeof this video we cannot use thesecondary cameras to take those portraitmode or depth effect photos which is ashame that feature releasing with thephone and not being available isn'tgreat but I expect that that will becoming soon with some firmware updatesso it does run stock Android 8.1 this isdefinitely one of the best features ofthe phone because it doesn't have anybloat either which is goodROM performance surprises here that itis very quick it is fast it's smooth thescreen is also another positive thatit's a bright screen now we also haveglobal LTE support on this one so it'sgoing to work everywhere around theworld another positive so when it comesto the cons well the loudspeakerperformance isn't so great and with thenotch you are missing out on seeing somedetails for example you cannot see someof the notifications we can't seeactually any notifications what thecurrent firmware way had set up you haveto swipe down to see the battery % nowthis happens with other mobile phones aswell you don't have any 4k videorecording so other mobile phones thatsell in this similar price category andgroup of this phone they offer I feel abit more there because you're getting 4kvideo support some of them even haveelectronic image stabilization supportthe likes are for example the redmi note5 that one there sells for about about220 us and if you use open camera youget EAS support and you do get a littlebit more there so it really depends allwhat you want from a mobile phonethere's also one other thing too that Ididn't point out in the video but it ismissing a status LED on this phone it'snowhere to be foundand even when you're charging it there'sno little red light to tell youyou're charging you've got a look at thescreen you can turn the screen on andsee the battery percent there so batterylife it's gonna last for around about 7to 8 hours of on-screen time that'scontinuous but expect around about 6hours there now charge time it's fairlyquick it comes in around one hour and 50minutes to fully charge the phone withthe included charger so that isn't badthere thank you so much for watchingthis unboxing and hands on with the UMIDIGI Z2 and I do hope to see you back inthe channel with more up-and-comingreviews\n"