00:00Hey it's Adrian and if you're looking for a smartphone around the $200 US mark it's
00:04worth checking out the Ulifone Note 17 Pro because it has a beautiful 6.78 inch curved
00:10AMOLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, an IR blaster to control household devices,
00:16fingerprint and face unlock, a 108MP main camera, a 5050mAh battery, always on display,
00:2412GB of RAM and a MediaTek Helio G99 CPU. There's also NFC functionality.
00:29Now all that sounds pretty good but there's a couple of things that may or may not be deal
00:34breakers for you. So let's take a closer look at how it performs and a big thanks Aliexpress for
00:39sending this out for review. Right now they have a ton of sales going on both on smartphones and
00:44a ton of other products so I'll leave links in the video description and pinned comments
00:48if you want to check that out but let's get into the video. In the box we have the Ulifone Note 17
00:54Pro TPU case, charging brick, USB Type-C to Type-C cable, SIM eject tool, manual warranty card and more.
01:01The design looks pretty nice and it feels well built too. It also has a little bit of a heft coming
01:06in at 196 grams or 0.4 pounds. We also have the curved 6.78 inch AMOLED screen but I do feel like the
01:14curvature is a little bit too extreme where it actually kind of disrupts how text looks if it
01:20sits on that curvature. The screen is made with Corning Gorilla Glass 5 and we have around a 93%
01:26screen to body ratio. There's tactile button presses, the microphone port and IR blaster at the top. At
01:32the bottom we have a speaker grill, the USB-C port and SIM card tray. The top of the screen has a slim
01:38front-facing speaker grill and then on the rear we have that dual ring camera module with 108 megapixel
01:45main camera and 5 megapixel macro with LED light. There's also a 32 megapixel front selfie camera.
01:51This phone is splash resistant but there's no official IP rating so keep that in mind. I have
01:56the pearl white version of the phone which has this type of sparkling glimmering type finish but it does
02:01come in other colors as well. The screen is a 6.78 inch curved AMOLED screen with a peak brightness of 500 nits
02:09and around 388 ppi so fairly sharp for video and text. Now video looks pretty vivid thanks to the AMOLED
02:16display and there's great contrast ratios in dark areas as you would expect and at 120hz refresh rate
02:22the screen is pretty fluid. Now there's options to lock it into 120hz, 90hz, 60hz or you could use the
02:28dynamic refresh rate as well. So yeah having an AMOLED screen up to 120hz refresh rate is fantastic to see
02:35on a phone at this price and it also has always on display you can customize that how you see fit you
02:40know it could be on all the time you could schedule it to be on. The Eulophone Note 17 Pro is running a
02:45MediaTek Helio G99 CPU and for everyday use it actually does the job pretty well. Opening most apps
02:51for the first time is usually pretty quick within one to two seconds and you can have a bunch of apps
02:56open in the background thanks to the 12 gigs of RAM plus the additional 12 gigs of virtual RAM. Let's talk
03:02about one of the deal breakers that I mentioned so this has 256 gigs of storage and there's no way to
03:08actually expand that there's no micro sd card slot on here. The other thing is that this is locked to
03:13Android 13 right now at the time of this video we're on Android 15 so if that matters to you just keep
03:20that in mind. Now this is running a Mali G57 GPU and I did put this through some benchmarks now it didn't
03:27do very well but considering the price of this it's not really meant to dominate benchmarks but let's
03:32talk about gaming performance next. So you'll be able to play a lot of casual mobile games without
03:37any type of issues but if you want to run higher end titles like Call of Duty Mobile or Genshin Impact
03:43if you want smooth FPS you will have to lower the graphics settings so I find myself having to go to
03:48the lowest settings or kind of low to medium just to ensure smooth and fluid gameplay. Hey but at least it
03:54actually ran it it didn't crash it didn't overheat significantly so let's talk about thermals. So
03:59when gaming of course without the case applied the phone got warm or a little bit hot but not hot
04:04enough where it was uncomfortable to hold or where I was worried so the ambient temperature before I
04:09started any type of gaming and benchmark I would say is between 23 to 24 degrees Celsius and after
04:14about 20 minutes of you know mixed use gaming and benchmarking the highest that I saw it jump up to
04:19was around 36 37 Celsius which is still pretty manageable. You can use face unlock and fingerprint
04:26unlock to unlock the phone now most of the time I use the fingerprint unlock and it was a pretty
04:31decent speed which it unlocked and fairly accurate as well. There's also an IR blaster at the top so I
04:36use the control app in here I set up my LG TV under a minute and I was turning my TV on off changing the
04:41volume from a good 15 feet away super cool feature. There's a 5050 milliamp hour battery in here and we have a
04:49max of 33 watts of fast wire charging but there is no wireless charging and you can easily get full
04:55day battery life out of this phone because we're not running you know a super powerful CPU or GPU like
05:02on most flagship phones so it's really going to come down to if you're using kind of you know that dynamic
05:06refresh rate if you're locking it to 120 hertz and of course what you have the screen brightness set to.
05:11The speakers on here get plenty loud of course it's not the most well-rounded type of sound it does lack
05:23a little bit of bass and treble but it's good enough overall. Now if you're going to be using wireless
05:29earbuds or headphones really no issues at all and this actually did come with a pair of wireless earbuds
05:34I just haven't reviewed those but let me know down in the comments if you'd like to see a review of
05:38those as well. In terms of the haptic so it's not as tight as I would like so you could probably hear
05:43this so you can hear the vibration motor going so the haptic feels like a little bit weak and a little
05:52bit too prolonged for my liking so probably something I'm going to turn off just to save battery life
05:57anyway. In terms of connectivity so we have support for two nano sim cards in the single card tray this
06:03also supports dual band wi-fi and up to 4g LTE speeds. All right let's talk about the camera
06:09experience because this may be one of those potential deal breakers. So on the rear we have a
06:13108 megapixel main lens and then we have a 5 megapixel macro lens as well and then on the front we have a
06:1932 megapixel selfie cam. Videos have a max resolution of 2k at 30 frames per second. Now when shooting video
06:28I did notice that the focus or the autofocus actually had to kind of hunt around anytime I was kind of panning
06:34at a decent speed so I did have to manually tap on the screen to kind of manually focus it but for
06:40tripod uses or static shots there's going to be no issues. And when taking photos under ideal lighting
06:46the Note 17 Pro actually takes nicely exposed photos and fairly clear as well but in low light situations
06:53it definitely struggles and I also found the same thing with the autofocus being a little bit slow
06:57to focus when I move from subject to subject. I also noticed that the image processing tended to
07:04oversaturate colors a little bit more than the true to life colors so just keep that in mind. So the
07:10camera experience on the Ulefone Note 17 Pro is a little bit of a mixed bag if you have you know fairly
07:15decent lighting most of the times and you're doing static shots or you know shots where there's not a lot of
07:20you know action or fast movement it's going to be perfectly fine. But if you are going to be doing
07:25you know kind of quick panning or you're jumping from subject to subject really quickly or you kind
07:30of want to use this for a vlog where you're walking talking and just kind of you know moving the camera
07:34around to show what you're talking about the autofocus is likely not going to keep up. You're going to
07:38have to tap on the screen to manually focus and when you do that that introduces a little bit of camera
07:44shape. The other thing is even on the videos there's not a lot of stabilization on here so that's
07:49something else to keep in mind and there is no optical zoom as well so it's all going to be
07:52digital. So definitely if you're a heavy camera user this is likely not the phone for you. So if
07:58you're looking for a brand new phone around the $200 US mark the Ulefone Note 17 Pro actually offers
08:04pretty good value if you're able to compromise in a couple of areas. It's great having a 6.78 inch
08:09AMOLED screen running at 120 hertz refresh rate. There's 12 gigs of RAM plus another 12 virtual RAM
08:15and IR blaster which is really handy. Good battery life and decent overall daily performance. But
08:21you'll have to compromise on not being able to play all mobile games at max graphics settings
08:26and you will find the camera experience a little bit lacking with the slow autofocus and the max
08:30recording resolution of 2k at 30 frames per second. So if you're interested in picking up the Ulefone
08:36Note 17 Pro I'm going to leave some coupon codes down below along with links to pick yours up at
08:41AliExpress and if you're looking for something with a little bit more specs AliExpress has
08:46hundreds of other phone models to choose from as well. And if you know of any other smartphones
08:50around the $200 US mark that you think offers great value let me know down in the comments below.
08:55If you found this video helpful would you mind liking and subscribing it truly does help me out quite a
08:59bit and stay tuned I have more upcoming cell phone and phone accessories videos. And while you're at
09:04it maybe consider checking out some of my other tech reviews. I review a bunch of different things
09:08headphones earbuds laptops monitors mechanical keyboards really something for everyone. I hope
09:13you'll join me in my next video soon.
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