UMI is allegedly already working on UMI Touch 2 (Helio X25)

After the initial success with UMI Touch sales many people were expecting an announcement of some upgraded Pro version. Instead we got watered down UMI Touch X model with the lower price price tag.

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But even that lower version is pretty good all things considered, because UMI has kept more or less the same design with full metal body made of aluminum alloy. Also the body being only 8.5mm thick is very reasonable while using hefty 4000 mAh battery capacity. UMI Touch X in available in presale offers for 119.99$.

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So what’s coming next from UMI? Are we going to get some higher version of the Touch model? According to the latest information is UMI already working on a successor in form of UMI Touch 2 and the phone should be packing the powerful Helio X25, while keeping the affordable 179.99$ price tag. It’s not official info yet though so we have to wait for confirmation from the official sources.

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About the author
Karel Balac
Working in IT since 2003. Chinese phone enthusiast in the last few years.

- Muhammad Yasir
  April 23, 2016
SnowyCat
April 23, 2016
will be hard to convince me this year after the le 2 pro and the zuk 2 pro for anything else…except for maybe a meizu mx6 but i’ll see…
but i dont know..i’m so used to a like china like ecosystem with usefull functions like in flyme or miui that i really dont liek these stock android versions that usually see 1-2 OTAs and no real features.
- Muhammad Yasir
  April 23, 2016
  - Karly Johnston
    April 23, 2016
Assefa Hanson
April 23, 2016
- Muhammad Yasir
  April 23, 2016
  link ?
  where do you get your daily fix o’ Chinese Mobile news when Andi and Yash are dozing off at Gizchina ?
  - Assefa Hanson
    April 23, 2016
    lol well i dont get “news” per say i just look at devicespecifications.com everyday and then scroll to the bottom to the latest devices, then i click the link on the page on the company to see the year of the phone, sometimes they have sources to the information if its “cool” enough
  - realjjj
    April 23, 2016
- - Marco Lancaster
    April 23, 2016
    Jiayu was going to visit their Jiayu.de partner to discuss about a Helio X20 and two midrange models this week. They still are slow lol
    At least development goes further, My S3 is running a early Alpha of CM13 =)
Muhammad Yasir
April 23, 2016
oh dear oh dear … wat the hell is going on ?!
E8hffff
April 23, 2016
Many phone makers have realised they missed the boat so to speak, being tempted by low price over stocked older Mediatek SoC.

Young
April 23, 2016
Seems Elephone/Elecrap bought UMI
WTF is going on?
Producing crap upon crap. Watch out, the first UMI Touch will have a lot of problem. This must be the main reason they released this.
Just like UMI Rome and UMI Rome X
Trust UMI at your own peril.
Young
April 23, 2016
- April 23, 2016
  Oh dear… That sh1t! I’ve got one of these pre-ordered…
  I’ve seen an Elephone P8000 and an Mlais M7 do that, it’s such a poor show from the companies…
  Obviously cutting corners massively to save money… Buy cheap, buy thrice I guess…
Inti Energia
April 23, 2016
Holy cow! I pre-ordered the UMI Touch in mid-February from TomBottom. If I will ever receive it (and the stone-cold silence from TomBottom is not encouraging) it will have been superseded by several newer models and have already entered into the steep discounting phase. Moral of the story – all of these discounted pre-order sales are to be avoided no matter how attractive the price.
- Assefa Hanson
  April 23, 2016
- - Adam Irvine
    April 23, 2016
    - Inti Energia
      April 23, 2016
      Well it’s not looking good. Three simple requests for information on delivery with no response. The site continues to show the order processing even after I received an email with a fake tracking number two weeks ago. Is there anyone home? And if there is, do they give a damn?
      - bizjonny
        April 25, 2016
Omer
April 23, 2016
I read the UMI Touch is a whopping 190grams. Hope the Touch 2 will be significantly lighter.

realjjj
April 23, 2016
With so many big)ger) China names going no microSD , 1080p and home button, it’s becoming almost impossible to find something else.
Xiaomi, Meizu, Zuk and likely OP go with all 3. Their way of differentiating is to make lesser devices. And because everything is the same and the cyranoesque button that ruins the front wasn’t enough, they all go 5.2 inch lol.
Vivo home button, Huawei 1080p and both have high prices,maybe Honor V8 is cheaper but i wouldn’t count on bellow 2499CNY. Qiku seems on their way to do a big screen with 1080p,cos” 1080p isn’t so 2013. LeEco doesn’t have microSD, shame on them. TCL is going 1080p or doing Windows phones, good luck with that. Maybe ZTE/Nubia comes up with something less retro and crippled.
Anyway,point being stop with the 1080p, home button and no microSD, there is too much of that. If UMI goes with 2 out of 3, it becomes harder for them to sell as users already have compelling options. Would be preferable if the device is a bit different.
- April 23, 2016
  What do you want? Energy slurping 2K displays? Although it’s hard up to 5.5″ to differentiate any up from 1080p and all rich media content is still mostly 1080p, websites shown with 1:1 pixel ration will be unreadable unless scaled. I just don’t see the benefit of going over 1080p except for that fact it would trump the competition/your neighbour’s phone. Seriously, who cares.
  Home button. What do you want? On-screen keys? fuck on screen keys, I want capacitive buttons. Home – back – menu, as always, notification LED home key works well with semi-hidden side buttons. FingerprintID sensor on the back is the worst thing ever with 5.5″ phones. You have to allocate 5 slots to the same finger to get decent accuracy, atleast a reader at the home button makes more sense, I like the idea of having one on the side too though.
  4.7″ for me was the ideal standard for quite a while (Jiayu G4x). 5.5″ used to be horribly humongous. 5.0″ was the new standard I could live with. I took the Nubia 5.2″ only because it was bezelless, so not that bad. Though, the Elephone P9000 is just as big as the Z9 with a case on. I’ve been hating on 5.5″ but it has become manageable. Still though, 5.2″ is a very nice size. But 6″ or something, no friggin way.
  I can however totally agree on ‘no microSD’, that’s a huge fucking shame. I don’t mind paying for a good phone, but I found hardly any dualSIM phones were around years ago. You had to go china level for that (Jiayu G2/Neomobile N002 e.g.). They all had expandable memory and separate dualSIM functionality. Superduper. Now… you have to give up dualSIM capability in order to expand your memory… or rather yet, they don’t give you the option to begin with. This is such bollocks! Just give us back the microSD slots! The rest I don’t see much problems there. But that’s just me.
  New high-end Nubia could be exciting. I seriously cannot imagine a phone without F.I.T. (Frame Interactive Technology). It’s a brilliant phone, though quite heavy and here as well, no dualSIM with expandable memory. Also… how can a phone lack FM radio… I mean, c’mon??! But hey, it has an IR blaster. Don’t know, not perfect yet. In meanwhile those ZUK Z2 specs sound crazy… Elephone i working on the S3 and P9000 Edge… Vernee pops out of nowhere making quite some waves. One phone after the other tries to get traction and throws around specs and features… it’s interesting times.
  - realjjj
    April 24, 2016
    What i want is not relevant, the point was what phone makers need to do to sell. And to a lesser degree what one gets for the $. If they make a budget high end with 1080p, fine but if they want to have a flagship,they need to go either 4k or 1440p curved.Not do the same shit as in PC and freeze all the specs. If they want to sell. They keep not pushing anything forward and then they whine that sales are poor.Amazing. If i need 4k or curved, has no relevance,what matters is if it sells better than same res as on 100$ devices and it does. High end is not a game of reason, it’s about shiny crap that people pay a premium for.
    Home button is a calamity that should have been erased from history 5 years ago but i really don’t care to explain the same thing every few days so w/e. All these morons are doing it because it’s easier for them and because a bunch of Apple and Samsung users are just used to it.
- Muhammad Yasir
  April 24, 2016
  i agree AND disagree ..
  why u hate FHD ?
  i agree on the SD point.
  and what can be a good replacment for home button ?
  - realjjj
    April 24, 2016
    I don’t hate FHD but it’s the third cycle in high end with 1440p already. Even flat 1440p is not enough in high end at this point, if they want to sell and drive upgrades. FHD is just fine in a 200$ device or if someone wants to make a cut down high end to reach a lower price but hell no in a 300$+ device.If their flagships are 1080p, that’s not sufficient.
    I could live with something like the LeEco 2 , if it had a microSD but no way in hell i would pay 300$ + for a 1080p device, not in 2016.
    As for home button, it’s the worst solution.It ruins the looks, makes devices look the same and unoriginal.It’s not ergonomic at all, especially on bigger devices. And it forces bigger bezels. At this point we could have phones with no upper and lower bezel at all, if anyone tried. So anything is better, no fingerpriint at all, on the back, on the side, under the glass (bellow the screen but no actual button and that is doable today with very thin glass, in a few months it will be doable with thicker glass so likely we see some of that).
    - Muhammad Yasir
      April 24, 2016
      oh … then in that case , WHY THE HELL NOT ?! I say we should have a SUB $190 Phone with 2k and all the GREAT specs and 4k Phones should rule the $240+ roost ! … sounds nice ?
      what are the best YET cheapest 2k panels going for , in bulk (for phonemakers obviously) ?
      im also furious about the no micro SD on Leco2 but what can u say … maybe we’ll get something better from these big guys in the next quarter. But agreed on the cottage phone makers , they’re too weak to sell truly premium devices BUT that also implies they should keep trying for the best possible combos in the sub $160 segment ! btw , i’d really like to know how much it costs to have an SD slot on a phone mainboard for the phonemaker and whats the disadvantage of including one from the manufacturer’s perspective?
      im interested in the ‘INVISIBLE’ fingerprint scanner … BUT , tell me what would it cost to implement :
      i ) thin glass invisible scanner
      ii) THICK glass invisible scanner
      iii) Side scanner
      iv) a GOOD iris scanner , like a true eye ID found on most high-end military installaitions and so on…
      i ask , because they say that Qualcomm’s ultrasonic costs quite alot AND is only possible in over-priced luxury phones.
      - realjjj
        April 24, 2016
        Wanted to add that even Apple is in trouble this year as they just don’t have enough bling to convince users to upgrade. iphone shipments are likely to decline 15% +(- a few % vs 2015.If that can’t convince China phone makers to not follow…what will?
        Prices for displays depend on quality too not just pixels.It also depends on demand vs supply balance. 1080p is cheap because it is used so much but if more would use higher res, prices would come down too. IHS in their preliminary estimate priced the S7’s (not Edge) screen at 55$. That doesn’t mean that you can’t do cheaper, after all AMOLED does cost more and there are different quality grades available. The resolution in itself doesn’t drive prices up by much, a high quality 1080p is not a lot cheaper.
        The microSD issue is just greed.They just want to sell models with more storage and/or force you to use their cloud services. Even if the cost was relevant it wouldn’t be a problem since it is a features that users want. They invest 10-15$ in a second back cam that does next to nothing and nobody really cares about, they are desperate to find features users want. The cost is really of no relevance, that’s how little it is. Think about it ,even 10$ dumbphones have a microSD slot. It’s just lack of any kind of decency and bad business.
        You have analysts concluding that the S7 is selling well because of the microSD slot after the S6 lacked one. Even Amazon realized that adding a microSD slot doesn’t hurt their cloud services and makes their customers happier.
        The cost for fingerprint is the sensor. The old style is swipe and the new one is area (like most have now). An area sensor costs a bit more but it’s just a couple of $ at this point and prices are declining as there are more and more decent suppliers- so more competition. Fingerprint Cards is used by most, Samsung is using Synaptics, Meizu in the Pro 6 is using GOODIX. The cost of the actual button is minimal, designing it is more of a pain.
        Under thin glass, very thin breaks easier and it’s not ideal and making a sensor that works under thicker glass is harder than it seems.Such sensors have been announced and we’ll see them in devices soon. As for the cost of Qualcomm’s solution no idea With a sensor under the glass, i would go with round and a circle of light around it when you press , to make it “cool” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAHmHMy2skA
        
        Muhammad Yasir
        April 24, 2016
        hmm… thanks for the massive analysis.
        some brilliant stuff in there and certainly learnt alot.
        hope the phonemakers follow suit…
        realjjj
        April 24, 2016
        One bit i forgot, under the glass sensor would be just hidden under the cover glass used for the entire screen, the sensor would cost more because it’s more capable but you save a bit by not having a button and cutting the glass to fit it.
      - realjjj
        April 24, 2016
        To put the resolution cost in a different way, in TVs, a 4k panel has only some 10-15% premium over 1080p.
- Karly Johnston
  April 25, 2016
  Chinaphones survive by competitve pricing. In order to command higher prices they have to establish a brand and provide excellent after sales service. Until they do that they will have to cut corners to maintain workable margins.
ALIEX
April 24, 2016

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