Doogee F5 review Doogee F5 Pro review
At this point, Doogee has been around long enough to be called a seasoned China brand. We don’t hear nearly as much about them as we used to, but this is mostly due to Doogee concentrating their efforts at the retail level in Europe and the UK. I’ve reviewed a couple of Doogee phones, and found them to be quite good both price wise and quality wise in comparison to the competition.
Up for review today is the Doogee F5– an astonishingly well priced mobile for the specs it carries.
Doogee F5 review style
Taking a look at the style of the Doogee F5, we see it’s extremely square. The frame is made from what Doogee terms “liquid metal” and with its very sharp corners can easily double as a serious weapon. Indeed I haven’t seen a mobile with corners this sharp since the THL T11 a couple of years back.
The sides look great with their horizontal lines which angle down at the top and the base, with CNC machined edges. Simple design elements such as these can drastically change the style of a phone. The Doogee F5 is premium looking no doubt.
Build is solid. There are no creaks in the phone at any point where I put pressure and the physical buttons give a tactile and audible click when pressed.
There is no lights for the capacitive (back, home, menu) buttons and I like it like that. It’s a smart decision that more and more models are beginning to latch on to.
The backpiece shuns finger prints and is very nice looking, leaning towards matte, but with a very nice sheen. Girth wise, the Doogee f5 at its thickest point comes in at a quite slim 8.8mm.
In an interesting move, Doogee has completely done away with black and white versions of the F5 and offer classy shades dubbed champagne, silver gray, and silver. The model I received is the silver variant and I’m digging it.
In the design and physical build department Doogee has done an excellent job; the Doogee F5 is a slick looker indeed.
Doogee F5 battery
The battery in the Doogee F5 is 2660mAh. It charges very smoothly to 95% in about 2 hours, with the remaining 5% taking about half an hour.
In my typical battery test of running a video over WiFi through YouTube at 140 lux, the Doogee F5 lasted 5 hours 30 minutes. This isn’t a great result compared to some of the recently reviewed mega-battery phones, but it wasn’t unexpected with a 5.5″ display and 2660mAh battery. This amount of juice equates to about 4-5 hours onscreen over a 12-24 hour period and should be plenty for light and moderate users.
In my brief testing of the battery, it discharged to a very low 4.3V, which is beyond what a Lithium should be discharged to for long life. Take a look at the 4th picture in the gallery above and you’ll see where the voltage drops steeply. Over time, this will hurt overall battery capacity, but is easily avoided by turning off the phone or putting it on the charger when voltage reaches 3.5. This issue is something that can be fixed in the kernel, and hopefully Doogee will address it at some point.
Doogee F5 review display
The display on the Doogee F5 is IPS OGS 5.5″@1080P, which gives us a retina PPI of 400. According to Doogee, the display is manufactured by AUO, whose parent company is Acer. Unfortunately my unit shows some minor spotting, but this may be an isolated issue as I’ve seen no other owners mention this.
With a white background, brightness maxes out at bright 355 lux, making usable in bright daylight. At its dimmest, the F5 registers 20 lux. If putting the phone in adaptive brightness mode, it will dim further down to an excellent 8 lux, which is great for bedtime reading.
Beyond the splotch, the LCD looks great, with strong colors and very strong whites. The viewing angles are excellent; looking at the display from even the most extreme angles has the colors and contrast remaining solid and true.
Doogee F5 OS and performance
The OS on the Doogee F5 is Android 5.1. Xender: a multi-device file sharing app, and Documents To Go: a multi-format document reader/writer were pre-installed. I’ve actually used these two in the past and found them to be very good apps. Thankfully, there is no Chinaware or junkware pre-installed, and if you don’t want Xender or Documents To Go taking up space, they can be uninstalled without rooting.
The Doogee F5 is extremely smooth and stable, with the MT6753 SoC pushing 1080P without issue.
Animations are very smooth and transitions are fluid. Slow scrolling is smooth and quick flick rapid scrolling works well.
There were no force closes and I have yet to come across any bugs.
There were two OTA updates which downloaded very quickly from the Doogee server and auto-installed through stock recovery with no problems.
Doogee F5 Pro review RAM
The 3GB RAM in the Doogee f5 make it excellent for multitasking. Apps are appropriately staying in memory; even several hours after I’d used them they were bam, right there where I’d left them.
Doogee F5 ROM / storage
Storage on the 16GB Doogee F5 is relegated to a single partition. After the OS, dalvik, and cache have taken their chunk, we’re left with 10GB free for user space. The F5 does have the option of using an external TF SD card, but note that this uses one of the SIM slots; you have the option of dual-SIM or single-SIM+TF SD.
Doogee F5 Antutu
The Doogee F5 Antutu score is 33870, with a 3D score of 6283 which makes it powerful enough to play the latest 3D games.
Doogee F5 camera picture samples photos
The rear camera on the Doogee F5 is the Samsung 3M-2. In good light, this camera produces sharp images with pleasant color. It’s great to see that Doogee fit a solid, name brand camera in the F5 at this price point.
These pictures were taken with the stock camera, as opposed to Google Camera which I usually use. They seem to have some saturation pop added by the Doogee camera app, but its not overdone.
The smaller seemingly closeup images are 100% crops from 13MP images.
[flickr_set id=”72157659618392634″]
Compare Doogee F5 / Samsung 3M2 pictures to other phones
Interestingly, for the front camera Doogee has not skimped; its made by Omnivision and carries a true 5.0MP sensor.
Doogee F5 additional components
- WiFi is good, reaching 90ft / 27m from my $20 home router while remaining strong and fast. Going beyond this caused the connection to slow and become unstable
- gps is good, with several satellite SNRs remaining in the mid 30’s and several satellites remaining in the mid-20’s. Cold lock was achieved within seconds
- OTG is working without issue. Excellent to see Doogee didn’t skimp here
- fingerprint sensor / touch ID is working no problem
- external speaker loud enough for hands free calling and music / videos
- mic and earpiece working appropriately
| Conclusion Summary | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|||||||||
While it would have been nice to see a compass included, there have been only a handful of occasions where I’ve needed a compass, and I do use mobile navigatation often. Also, it should be noted that very few devices have compasses at this price point.
Doogee has taken it to another level with the F5. A Samsung camera, LTE 4G, touch ID, 1080P display, OTG, and fantasticly slick style at the incredible bargain price of $139 make the Doogee F5 a phone I can recommend.
If you value battery life over style and camera, the Mlais MX Base is one of my favorite phones of the year, with outstanding battery life and butter smooth operation.
As always, I encourage questions, requests and comments, either here in the comment section or at the forum www.chinaphonearena.com.
Leave a Reply