Ulefone Armor 2

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• Anonymous
• n67
• 07 Nov 2024

Another observation: strangely, fast charging is deactivated while the rear camera is in use, but not the front camera!

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• Anonymous
• 0}d
• 29 Jan 2024

I have experienced some glitches with this device, but I believe it is the fault of MediaTek and not UleFone. Other smartphones which use MediaTek's software from that time are likely also affected.

- A few times, the camera stopped recording video after 5 to 10 seconds while the sound recording continues. There is no indication of this on the viewfinder, so everything might seem normally while in actuality, no video is being recorded. When playing back that video file, the video stops but the audio continues. The video file has a much smaller size than would be expected from its duration, so the video was never written to this file. While this happened rarely, once or twice per year, this is one of the strangest glitches I have ever experienced on a smartphone.

- The file manager made by MediaTek can not copy or move a selection of more than 4 GB to the MicroSD card, even if the individual files are below 4 GB. 4 GB is the limitation of the FAT32 file sytem for a single file, however, the MediaTek file manager limits the entire selection to 4 GB. The programmers didn't pay attention here. Why not use exFAT? Because stock Android 7 didn't support exFAT, only some vendors like Samsung did. (Granted, at least it stays in the same directory after tapping "copy" or "move". Some file managers annoyingly go back to the home directory rather than staying at the current directory.)

- If the camera server crashes and the "couldn't connect to camera" error appears, the voice recorder app, also by MediaTek, shows a "Recording failed" on-screen notification and deletes the unfinished recording. (To its credit, at least it uses timestamped file names. Samsung is stuck in 2005 and uses numerical file names, which makes later searching far more difficult.)

- Once every few weeks, the camera server gets stuck (the camera app says it couldn't connect to the camera). The only way to get out of this is to reboot the device. While Samsung apparently detects a stuck camera server and taskkills it automatically, this phone doesn't have that ability.

- The OpenCamera app can preview the front camera at 60 frames per second, but once you hit the record button, the camera server crashes.

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• H
• Hendrix
• 0}C
• 12 Sep 2023

It is strange how the front camera image sensor is from the American vendor OmniVision where as the rear camera image sensor is from South-Korean vendor Samsung Semiconductors.

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• exerceo
• 0}d
• 07 Aug 2023

Another few observations:
In HDR photo mode, exiting the camera application or opening the gallery or deactivating HDR mode before the photo finished saving, meaning before the preview appears at the shortcut to the gallery, causes the photo to not be saved.
"Zero shutter lag" can be deactivated, likely to allow for more steady holding in darkness. However, while "zero shutter lag" is deactivated, the ISO setting does not change the preview in the viewfinder, only the resulting picture. The highest automatic ISO stored in the metadata is 314 instead of 234. The viewfinder performs digital zooming in the same way as in video, meaning up to 2 megapixels, but this limitation has no effect on the resulting picture.

Thankfully, tap-to-focus affects exposure too, including in video mode.

The text on the viewfinder is difficult to read if the scenery is bright, since the text has no shadow.

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• exerceo
• 0}d
• 02 Aug 2023

The JPEG quality of burst shot pictures is 90% and the usual JPEG quality is 95 %, to reduce the file size of burst shot photos. This can be verified in IrfanView on Windows and the identify -format '%Q' command on Linux.

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• exerceo
• 0}d
• 02 Aug 2023

Another good thing is that photographs are saved with 4:2:2 instead of 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. It would be more useful though if the image sensor didn't show significant noise starting already at a low ISO of 200.

USB OTG media is not listed in the file manager provided by MediaTek and also not in third-party file managers. For the latter, it likely is caused by Google restrictions, but the bundled file manager by MediaTek is not supposed to have such an issue. This makes USB OTG media solely accessible through the stock Android file manager by Google, also known as "documents UI". While copying or moving files to USB OTG media, the entire system becomes laggy.

Usually, the smartphone is fast, likely due to the generous 6 GB of RAM. Apps launch quickly.

The "PTT" (push-to-talk) button acts as a wake-up button. Thankfully, the Armor 2 supports double-tap wakeup. It is more useful than hover-to-wake-up (also known as "air wake-up") due to the latter happening by accident,

It also supports stand-by gestures such as drawing C to launch the camera, and a few custom gesture shortcuts can be defined. However, the screen shows an animation of the gesture before launching the app, which adds an annoying delay.

The camera can be launched by double-pressing the stand-by button or by holding the camera button for five seconds. The latter is useless for quick-launching due to the five-second delay. The former is prone to happening by accident. The power button might recognize a single press as two presses.

The video mode lacks a manual white balance setting, resulting in the image being too cold.

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• e
• exerceo
• 0}d
• 30 Jul 2023

The front camera uses the OmniVision OV8856 image sensor, which is a general-purpose 4:3 eight-megapixel sensor, 3264×2448 pixels. Strangely, the highest resolution option provided by the software on the front camera is 13 megapixels. The rogue 13 megapixel option is a useless waste of space storage, since the only way this is possible is by upscaling. Obviously, that does not increase the image quality since one can not create information out of thin air.

Another disappointment is that the video mode does not make full use of the image sensor's digital zooming ability like it does on Samsung phones. Only photo mode does that on the Armor 2. On Samsung phones, zooming while recording a video causes a cropped section of the image sensor to be read out if the resolution of the image sensor exceeds that of the video resolution. If the limit of the image sensor's resolution is reached, it transitions into lossy digital zooming. It does not show at which point it starts transitioning into lossy digital zooming, so one has to manually calculate it for each resolution. It would be best if it limited the user to lossless-only digital zooming. However, the video mode of the Armor 2 only crops into a 1080p image distributed over the full field of view. It is as if the image sensor only had a 1920×1080 resolution while video mode is enabled. This means there is no lossless digital zooming at 1080p, only 1.5× at 720p, and only 2.25× at 480p. Had digital zooming been properly implemented, meaning if the Armor 2 used the highest possible 16:9 resolution of the image sensor for cropping, which I assume is 4608×2592 as calculated from the image sensor width, it could have been 2.4× for 1080p, 3.6× for 720p, and 5.4× for 480p.

There is a 5376×3024 photo option as well (16 megapixels 16:9), but since it has the same field of view width as the 4608×3456 (16 megapixels 4:3) option and cuts off a part at the top and the bottom, one can assume the option is rogue similar to the 13 megapixel option on the front camera. The 16 megapixel Samsung phones (S5, Note 4, S6, Note 5) use a slightly different "16 megapixel" resolution, 5232×2988, which is genuine. They actually use a 16:9 image sensor.

Sometimes, burst mode initiates by accident. It appears that lags caused by a background process causes the phone to fail noticing that the shutter button has been released, causing it to think that the user is holding it long to initiate a burst shot. Sadly, there is no way to turn burst shooting off. There is an option to set the burst shot limit between 40 or 99, but not 0. The only imaginable use of burst mode is bursting in low light and then selecting the good photos by deleting photos which are blurred due to hand movements. Similar to Samsung's "best shot" which they introduced on the Galaxy S3 in 2012. Thankfully, burst mode does not initiate from the volume buttons or with HDR or scene detection enabled.

Another annoyance is that focusing can take long in low light, and when tapping on the viewfinder instead of one of the icons on the side or the zoom selector, one has to wait until the focus has finished, since the other camera controls are greyed out until the focus is finished. This is a poor choice of user experience.

As a positive, the bundled camera software launches quickly, in one second, and the shutter lag and the delay between photos are very low. Also, video duration is not limited to 60 minutes like on many Samsung phones! So if one wants to film a long speech or vlog without being interrupted at the one-hour mark, this comes in useful.

If the camera app is exited with the "back" button, atriangle pointing left, instead of the "home" button, a circle, it thankfully launches on the rear camera regardless of which camera was last used! There is not a single reason to launch on the front camera. It only causes missed moments. Also, exiting with the back button causes the camera app to launch in photo mode, regardless of the last used mode.

An observation about something else than the camera: The battery temperature sensor indicates a lower temperature during a charge. This means it might indicate 30 degrees while charging, but then 36 degrees after unplugging the phone. This happens across multiple battery monitoring applications, meaning it is related to hardware. Unlike on some other vendors' phones (Samsung, Xiaomi), the temperature is not indicated with a digit behind decimal, so it only shows, for example, 25.0°C and 26.0°C, not 25.1°C.

The camera application has an option for saving video files with either with a MP4 or 3GP extension. It does not affect the content of those files. Both use the H.264 video format, the AAC audio format, and the same bit rates. However, the option is separate for the front and the rear camera, so it can be used to separate files from the front and rear camera. There is also an "anti-flicker" option for 50 Hz and 60 Hz. Apparently it prevents exposure times of 1/50 and 1/60, but this is just a guess. For audio, there is a "noramal" mode and a "meeting" mode. I can't say I know what it does.

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• ?
• Anonymous
• 0}d
• 30 Jul 2023

The Armor 2 also has HDR photo on the front camera. Quite solid for a 2017 mid-ranger, given that Samsung first introduced front camera HDR only two years prior, on the S6 in 2015. Even without HDR, the dynamic range of the Armor 2, both on the front and rear cameras, is better what the Samsung Galaxy S5, a 2014 flagship, delivers with HDR activated. With HDR on, the dynaminc range of the Armor 2 is comparable to that of DSLM cameras. The field of view of the camera is also surprisingly wide.

While the dynamic range is outstanding, the image sensor sadly starts showing visible noise at ISO 200, so the Armor 2 performs well for daylight photos which can easily be done at ISO 100, but in low light, one might as well select a resolution of 3 megapixels and no quality is lost. The image sensor is provided by Samsung, type "S5K3P3", which is intended for very low-end phones. Even similarly-priced competing phones such as the Doogee S60 include far better image sensors, specifically a Sony IMX230 in this case, and the Doogee S60 rear camera even is optically stabilized. It would have been reasonable for UleFone to raise the price by a few dollars to include a somewhat better image sensor than the "bottom of the barrel", and more importantly, optical image stabilization. Even the highest-quality image sensor is of little use for handheld filming if videos appear shaky due to lack of stabilization.

Looks like UleFone partially learnt from their mistakes. According to TechRadar, the Armor 3 indeed includes the IMX230 rather than low-end scrap S5K3P3. But there is no mention of optical image stabilization. Come on, you can do better, UleFone. Granted, the Armor 2 has a USB-C port whereas the Doogee S60 is among the last Micro USB type B smartphones. UleFone is so proud of USB-C that they even printed "USB-C" on the bottom flap that covers the port.

Due to the lack of optical image stabilization, the Armor 2 has to be held really steady. The longest exposure time is 1/10 of a second, but can be extended to 1/5 of a second if the ISO is manually selected in the "Professional" camera mode (which is not so professional because it lacks manual focus and manual exposure time, but it has ISO and exposure value like pretty much any pre-installed camera software of 2010 onwards.).

There is no way to lock the focus in the bundled camera app. Video recording close subjects is disturbed by the autofocus failing by focusing far, resulting in a blurred video. However, third party applications such as the open-source "OpenCamera" can lock the focus, even during video recording.

The resolution selector is quite generous. It ranges all the way from QVGA 320×240 to 16 megapixels, both with 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratio ophions. The last Samsung phone with a QVGA photo option and a QCIF (176×144) video option was the Galaxy S2. Some newer phones such as Xiaomi's phones lack a photo resolution selector altogether or only have two selectable resolutions such as 16 megapixels and 64 megapixels. Lower resolutions are sometimes preferred to reduce space consumption.

The camera of the Armor 2 achieves a solid low light performance, because the framerate can adjust between 30, 24, 20, 15, and 10 frames per second in low light. Arguably, having 10 frames per second of visible footage is better than 30 frames per second of near-darkness. It automatically adjusts the framerate during video recording, and the video is encoded as VFR, meaning variable frame rate. The frame rate can not be set manually in the per-installed camera application, but the third-party app "Open Camera" can do it. Its minimum selectable frame rate is 15. The maximum is 120, but video footage recorded at selected 120 frames per second still appear like 30 frames per second when watched. This could be due to the limitations of the CPU or GPU. The Armor 2 can play back 1080p@60fps and 1440p@30fps footage smoothly, but decoding takes less effort than encoding anyway.

The ISO light sensitivity range is saved inconsistently in the EXIF data. The range of automatic ISO is saved as ISO 34 (lowest possible) to 234 (highest possible), but manual ISO is saved as ISO 100 to 1600, as selected. It appears that ISO 34 in automatic mode equals ISO 100 in manual mode, and ISO 234 in automatic mode is the same as ISO 800 if selected manually. This means ISO 1600 is only accessible manually, possibly to protect inexperienced photographers who never touch advanced settings from too noisy pictures.

The displayed ISO range is different with flash enabled. The highest is four-hundred something. I have not tested the lowest yet.

When recording a video onto the MicroSD card, there is a screechy noisy sound every few seconds. This makes the Micro SD card useless for video recording. Needless to say, this is massively disappointing for anyone who relies on their smartphone as a camcorder. However, any camera that is not optically stabilized is not so useful for handheld video recording anyway, since the tiny shakes appear like an earthquake on a television or computer monitor. Those tiny shakes magnify over the large screen space, resulting in a deteriorated watching experience. For the same reason, I'd venture to say that any smartphone by Samsung before the Galaxy Note 4 (excluding the "Zoom" and "Galaxy Camera" models) and any iPhone before the 6s+ are immature as a production camcorder. (Sorry, Emily from the iPhone 6s "Onions" commercial. You should have used the 6s Plus. Not the iPhone 6 Plus since it only optically stabilizes photos, not videos.)

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• ?
• Anonymous
• 0}d
• 30 Jul 2023

After years of use, the battery is still performing well, however, the rubber parts are tearing off. Since the rubber parts are built on the device and not an external case, they can not be replaced, and phone case makers assume outdoor smartphones do not need cases, so they neglect them.

The UleFone Armor 1 from 2015 has physical buttons outside the screen similar to the Samsung Galaxy Xcover 1 to 4, but on the Armor 2, the bottom space outside the screen is disappointingly wasted. It has a non-button fingerprint scanner like the HTC E9, and the buttons are virtual on-screen buttons.


The sound recorder app chooses a sampling rate of 48 kHz for the "high" quality setting and 32 kHz for "medium". Like the video camera, it records in stereo, meaning from both microphones. The bit rates are 128 kbit/s and 48 kbit/s for "high" and "medium" respectively. Files are gladly named with a timestamp, in the format "record20230730152456.3gpp". The choice of sampling rates and bitrates is more reasonable than that of Samsung's pre-installed voice recorder, which choses 44.1 kHz and 128 kbit/s in "high" quality mode and 16 kHz and 51.2 kbit/s in "medium" quality mode. The latter has a significantly lower audio quality due to the low sampling rate, yet a higher bit rate was picked. Samsung's voice recorder app also records in mono (1 channel) only, resulting in lack of spatiality. Anyway, third-party applications such as NLL ASR allow a manual selection of bit rate and sampling rate, and also allow recording in the patent-less OGG format instead of the format used by the pre-installed apps, AAC. The multimedia platform Wikimedia Commons does not support AAC for this very reason.

The voice recorder application does not end the recording when starting the camera app, only when starting to record a video, since it needs the microphone and Android OS apparently restricts the microphone to being accessed by only one process at a time. In comparison, the voice recorder of Samsung does end the recording when the camera is started. While recording, the so-called "moov atom" of the audio file is saved regularly, so if the phone crashes or the application is ended unexpectedly, the unsaved audio file is playable. The Samsung voice recorder does not do this, resulting in potentially unplayable deadweight files. Even a compact casette recorder from 1970 does not have such a problem! The OGG format used by some third-party voice recorders is immune to this problem since it does not use so-called moov atoms to begin with.

Something very disappointing about the audio recorder application is that the current recording is discarded (deleted) if the phone is shut down or rebooted during a recording. It should be saved. In addition, the "discard" button has no confirmation so tapping it accidentally causes the current recording to be lost. If a recording is paused, tapping the "record" button without saving the current file results in the current file to be discarded. Most importantly, if the Android camera server crashes in midst of a recording, which happens roughly one in a hundred times, the voice recorder shows a "Recording failed." message and the currently recorded file is automatically deleted. This is very, very poorly designed. It should not be possible to "discard" an audio file to begin with. If the user wishes to delete an audio file, the user can just as well do so from the file manager.

The file manager application is provided by the chipset manufacturer MediaTek. It thankfully features a scroll bar (unlike Google's pre-installed file manager on Android OS, known under the code name "documents UI"), and it remains in the same directory after selecting files and tapping the "copy" or "move" icon. Some other file managers like that of Google or that of Samsung ("My Files") go to the starting directory where the user selects between internal storage and MicroSD card. This is a common trait among low-tier file managers. If the aim was to move files to a subdirectory, the user has to navigate all the way back to the directory that contains the source files. However, the MediaTek file manager does not display thumbnails for photos and videos. This can be beneficial for battery saving, but bad for seeking. If thumbnails are desirable, Google's pre-installed file manager has to be used.

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• G
• Geoa
• rUJ
• 16 Mar 2023

Anonymous, 31 Dec 2022I have made some observations about the UleFone Armor 2. Th... moreThat's weird that yours is readable in daylight, my Armor 2 is so dim at highest setting I can't see anything in sunlight, I tried auto brightness and it got even darker, so I can't really use as a main phone,

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• G
• Geoa
• rUJ
• 16 Mar 2023

My Armor 2 has a Sandisk 200gb micro sd that works fine, I first tried 2 different 128gb Sandisk's and it said they where coruppted even though both work in other phones fine, Guess Armor 2 is just picky?

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• ?
• Anonymous
• 0}C
• 22 Jan 2023

Apparently, the device only supports FAT32 and not the exFAT file system on microSD cards.

When I insert a memory card with exFAT that works perfectly well on Samsung devices, the Armor 2 notifies me that the memory card is "damaged" and offers me to "repair" it, which means reformatting it. When I do, obviously after backing up the data, the Armor 2 reformats it as FAT32. That's the file system which has a 4 GB file size limit.

This is disappointing.

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• ?
• Anonymous
• mJ}
• 31 Dec 2022

I have made some observations about the UleFone Armor 2. They might individually seem trivial, but when put together, they become significant.

The most important thing:

* Charging rate unaffected by use. When used while charging, instead of throttling charging like Samsung does, it just pulls additional power from the wall adapter, like laptops do.

It charges with 10 W, which is not all that much, but at least it remains at 10 W when in use. Meaning if the phone uses, for example, 4 W while being charged, it pulls out 14 W from the charger.

Other things:

* Battery still performs well after five years, as it should since it is not replaceable. My S7 Edge battery only lasted 3.5 years. Now, the S7 edge does not power on without being connected to a charger.
* Does not nearly heat up as much as Samsung phones while charging (both tested at 10 W for fairness).
* 6 GB RAM is very generous for this price range. The Samsung Galaxy S8 flagship from the same year, 2017, costed more than twice as much and only has 4 GB of RAM.
* High screen brightness. Clearly readable at daylight.
* Since it uses MediaTek Pump Express with 12V, the Armor 2 can accept any voltage from 5 to 12 V for charging. I tested that even 14 volts work, but did not test beyond that since that is unsafe.
* Physical camera shutter button for more photography-like feeling.
* Fast and responsive camera with little shutter lag.
* Feature to let the LED blink all the time in stand-by mode. This is highly useful at night in dark rooms, to find where the phone is. On Samsung, always-on display can be used for this purpose.
* Very strong speaker. One of the two speaker grills is placebo, but the one speaker is very powerful for a device that size.
* Touch screen is responsive and not sluggish, even at cold temperatures, as one would expect from an outdoor smartphone.
* The camera application thankfully always starts on rear camera, even if closed with front camera being last used. I can hardly put into words how annoying it is for the front camera to open instead of the rear camera, and moments are missed.
* Starting camera and capturing photos does not interrupt voice recorder like on Samsung smartphones. Only starting video recording does, where it is actually necessary since Android is apparently unable to let more than one task access the microphone.
* Digital zoom logged in EXIF data
* EXIF data for HDR photos
* Sound recorder application uses time-stamped file names. Samsung uses numbers, so I have to use NLL ASR there for timestamped filenames.
* Front camera supports lossless digital zoom for video recording. Samsung does not.
* Camera does not focus on windshields.
* Power button menu contains "mute", "vibration only", "ringtone on", like Samsung did before 2015.
* File manager remains in current directory after selecting files for moving.
* File manager shows progress and number of files loaded in large directories, rather than just displaying "loading" like in Samsung's "my files".
* File manager allows file names with more than fifty characters, unlike Samsung "My Files" did few years ago, last time I checked. I am not sure whether it changed.
* File manager does thankfully not hide status bar, like Samsung "My Files" did in 2015 and 2016. I need to see the clock when naming directories.
* Videos are not limited to one hour in length! It keeps recording!
* Rear camera has a wide field of view.
* Rear camera has good dynamic range.
* Unlike Samsung, it can save burst shots to MicroSD. However, I rarely ever use burst mode anyway.
* Video recording options are 144p, 240p, 480p, 720p, 1080p. Sometimes the lower resolutions are necessary to save space on long videos such as recording myself handcrafting. I would rather be able to record at a lower resolution than running out of space.
* The 480p option is 720×480, not 640×480. The wider 3:2 format is much more comfortable and does not look like a 1990s television like 4:3 does.
* Ability to save screenshots and audio recordings to MicroSD. They both follow the default storage device set in the settings. Last time I checked, few years ago, Samsung had no option for saving screenshots to MicroSD.
* Double-tap wake up. Much more comfortable than hover wake up (Samsung calls it "air wake-up") due to not happening accidentally.
* When the camera is launched from the lock screen, photos can still have GPS location tags. Not with Samsung.
* Camera setting menu resembles a Galaxy S5-like grid. The viewfinder remains in background and is immediately accessible rather than first having to close the setting menu.
* The exposure value compensation control of camera has a wide range. Wider than Samsung has.
* Screencast (screen video recording) feature
* Shortcut for digitally zoming between ×1, ×2, ×3. The limit using pinch zoom is ×5. Digital zooming is useful if a lower resolution is selected, since it captures from a cropped area of the image sensor, but one has to know the limit for each resolution. This can be calculated by dividing the pixel height of the highest resolution option with at the same aspect ratio by the pixel height of the selected resolution.

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• ?
• Anonymous
• n67
• 30 Sep 2022

The low light video performance is surprisingly good due to variable frame rate. Normally, it films at 30 frames per second, but in low light, the frame rate drops to 10 frames per second to prolong the exposure time per frame, which triples the brightness! That's clever!

It beat many more expensive phones in low light video because those only had constant frame rate at 30fps.

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• ?
• Anonymous
• n67
• 17 Sep 2022

After lots of experience with Samsung phones, here are some observations on the camera of the UleFone Armor 2:

While the camera unfortunately produces somewhat noisy images, even at daylight, at least it launches quite fast and has a low shutter lag. Sometimes, oddly, it has a lag of a few seconds until launched, possibly due to interference from a background process, but it launches quickly most of the times, say 19 out of 20 times.

The dynamic range and exposure setting is surprisingly good. Samsung phones in the past had an annoying tendency to underexpose pictures, forcing the user to compensate using the exposure value feature, but the exposure of the Armor 2 works well.

Tapping into the viewfinder conveniently adjusts both focus and exposure.

The focus is somewhat slow, especially in low light, presumably due to lack of phase detection. However, at least it does almost never focus on windshields like Samsung devices. If a camera focuses on a windshield, the photo is ruined, no matter how high the resolution is. A 108 megapixel photo of a windshield (when not intended) is less useful than a properly focused 5 megapixel photo. 2000s digital pocket cameras even had a "landscape" scene mode dedicated to preventing exactly that! Yet modern smartphones lack it!

Unlike Samsung, the Armor 2 even lets me adjust the exposure value with HDR enabled. Also, the exposure value compensation range is significantly wider than on Samsung phones. However, the camera software lacks manual exposure.

The camera shutter button unfortunately is only single-level, meaning it can not be used for point-and-shooting intuition like on the Samsung Omnia 2 from 2009 (arguably the best phone at its time). But better than none.

The camera is faster launched by double-pressing the power button than by holding the shutter button, since the latter requires a five-second hold. Needless to say, that defeats its use as a quick launch shortcut.

While the Armor 2 lacks slow motion, the third-party camera software "open camera" allows filming in slow motion. It lets me set anything up to 1080p at 120fps, but it only is effective up to 480p at 120fps and 720p at 60fps. The frame rate does not go above that, even if a higher setting is selected. Possibly that is due to hardware limitations. Strangely, the Galaxy S7 with the same GPU (Mali T880) is able to film at 720p at 240fps and 2160p at 30fps.

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• ?
• Anonymous
• 0}C
• 18 Aug 2022

Burst mode can be disabled by enabling HDR or auto scene detection, though that adds a slight shutter lag.
What makes burst shot especially annoying is that it does not end when releasing the shutter button. One needs to press it again,

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• k
• kk111
• n67
• 16 Mar 2021

Further observation: Strangely, the fingerprint scanner disengages after 16 days and around 10 hours of uptime, which was the most common reboot reason for me (next to the camera server freeze glitch, which occurs on varying uptimes).

I am not sure why that happens, or if it only affects me.

• Reply

• k
• kk111
• n67
• 22 Feb 2021

6 GB of RAM is also generous for this price range, especially in 2017. (If only apps could be pinned so they are never closed in background, so they never need reloading.) But I forgot to add few observationsand:

The third-party camera app "Open Camera" has a long shutter delay (around an entire second) between photos, but it can do something the precluded camera software can not do:

Slow motion!

That's right! It can record smoothly at 864×480@120fps and 720p@60fps.

Higher settings such as 720p@120fps, 1080p@60fps and 1080p@120fps can be selected, but the framerate is unstable and sometimes stuttering.

I wonder if it supported 240fps at an even lower resolution, if OpenCamera had such option. Or maybe the image sensor offers these options (read by OpenCamera).

But this makes me wonder: Other phones with the same GPU such as the 2016 flagship Galaxy S7 (GPU: Mali T880) do support 2160p@30fps (2.5 years after Galaxy Note 3), 1080p@60fps(Note 3 had that too), 720p@240fps, and smooth 1080p@120fps playback.

The Helio P25 CPU allegedly supports 2160p 4K, according to MediaTek: https://www.mediatek.com/blog/mediatek-helio-p25-expands-the-p20-family (makes me wonder where their MT6795 1080p@960fps plans of 2015 went).

The Armor 2 smoothly plays 1080p@60fps, 720p@120fps and 1440p@30fps. 2160p plays smoothly for a few seconds, then may halt completely. Also 1080p@120fps does not play smoothly, despite the same chipset.

Fast charging surprisingly works while using the front, but not the rear camera, except if the elevated voltage (9V or 12V) is manually applied through a KW203 USB multimeter which has shortened data lanes on port 2 (do not try unless you have knowledge about electrical engineering).

The video recording can be paused and unpaused without delay, allowing to create videos with short sections from different locations for fun.

The lossless digital zoom for videos of the front camera can use the full image sensor resolution, while only 1080p equivalent on the rear (meaning no lossless digital zoom if the selected resolution is 1080p). But for photos, lossless digital zoom is supported. For both cameras, the viewfinder itself only supports lossless digital zoom if the ZSL (zero shutter lag) mode is enabled itself, strangely.

The camera flash is brighter during focus than when capturing the photo itself!

In "professional" (not really) mode, the ISO setting only works when ZSL (zero shutter lag) mode is enabled.

• Reply

• k
• kk111
• n67
• 22 Feb 2021

While the rear camera's image sensor is not good, at least the camera software (package name: com.mediatek.camera) is very fast (low shutter lag), and low-light performance for video recording is improved with VFR (variable frame rate), where frame rate may be adjusted between 10fps and 30fps to extend exposure time when necessary.

Video recording in daylight has low noise.

Also, the front camera supports lossless digital zooming for video recording, which is a rather rare feature on smartphones.

Photos during video recording have the same resolution as the video itself, making the feature almost redundant.

Protip: Deactivating the zero shutter lag mode in settings may reduce shake blur in low light. Apparently, the software times the capture to a moment with low shake. They should have inverted it and named it "night mode" because otherwise the user asks themselves why they would ever deactivate zero shutter lag.

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• K
• Keekay
• n67
• 14 Jan 2021

Another thing to add:

After around two years, the power button started getting unresponsive. One needs to push it very hard.

Usually, a failing non-replaceable battery is the death sentence of a mobile phone. On the Armor 2, the battery terminals are behind the motherboard, meaning that replacing it is dangerous and might inadvertently destroy the phone.

But on the Armor 2, the rubber band and power button failed first.

I searched for a case for the Armor 2, but it did not exist. Possibly the power button and rubber band being exposed lead to these problems. The irony of an outdoor phone.

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