All smartphone manufacturers appear to cut the corners of their displays and make them look bezel-less. There is not much practical use of that but those infinity displays just look great. The Chinese phone maker Doogee aims to deliver bezel less smartphone experience for just about $170. Stay tuned to find out if the Doogee Mix is worth the money in the full Doogee Mix Review.
VIDEO REVIEW
UNBOXING
The phone ships in quite a nice box and inside of it you can find all the usual stuff. Some extras include a case to protect the phone and a screen protector.
DESIGN and DISPLAY
The design is the key selling point of Doogee Mix but the main question is if the device is truly bezel-less. Well, there are tiny bezels along with the black bars but they are cut to the minimum. Even though I would not call the Doogee Mix a truly bezel-less phone, it is still one of the best-looking budget devices you can buy. Anyway, the Xiaomi Mi Mix is not fully bezel-less neither.
A Samsung-made 5.5” 1080p AMOLED display is just gorgeous to look at as it is punchy and vibrant. However, I found the colors to be slightly oversaturated for my taste. The sunlight legibility is not the best but it is quite decent.
The earpiece is on the top but the 5MP front facing camera is implemented on the bottom, so you would probably need to take selfies holding the phone upside down.
There are customizable on-screen navigation keys but you can also use a capacitive home key to navigate through the user interface and I found it really useful. The fingerprint scanner is not the fastest I’ve seen but it gets the job done to unlock the phone straight from the standby mode.
The overall build quality is good and the phone sits nicely in the hand. However, I found that the buttons a little bit rattle.
HARDWARE and PERFORMANCE
The Doogee Mix is not all about the looks as it is plenty powerful for the price. The device ships with an octa-core Helio P25 chip, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of expandable storage. You can also opt in for a slightly more expensive model that has 6GB of RAM.
The gaming performance is just great. I was able to run all the 3D games on the highest graphics settings without any issues, which is kind of impressive given the price of the phone. The device gets a little warm on the upper portion but that doesn’t impair the performance.
BENCHMARKS
USER INTERFACE
The Doogee Mix ships with the Android 7.0 out of the box but we have a proprietary skin on top of it that brings a little bit different look and it has quite a few extra features.
Just to name a few, you can read the latest news if you swipe to the left, choose from quite a few different themes or wallpapers, or use a floating gesture that I usually find annoying as it gets in my way. You can also choose from a variety of gesture controls that work pretty well or use one hand operation mode.
What is the most important for me on any phone is the speed and fluidity. I found the Doogee Mix to be quite fast but there is some occasional stutter if you simply swipe through menus back and forth. It just seems that some of the animations have some skipped frames. This is not a deal breaker but I believe we will see a software update quite soon since my device runs on an early software build.
CAMERAS
When it comes to optics, the Doogee Mix has quite an interesting dual-camera setup that consists of one 16MP shooter and another 8MP sensor. The camera app takes pictures really fast. There are some shooting modes to make the best out of dual camera setup like blur mode that takes pictures with the bokeh effect.
The pictures taken using this mode look quite okay but they are far from the flagship-grade quality.
The daylight image quality is disappointing for a $170 phone. I took most of the pictures under perfect lighting conditions but the images lack detail, sharpness, the colors are usually washed out and the dynamic range adjustment is kind of poor. Sure, you will be able to take some decent photos but you will usually see these shortcomings.
The low-light camera performance is just bad. There is plenty of noise and low amount of detail.
You can also utilize the secondary sensor to take pictures with up to 4x lossless zoom, at least this is what Doogee claims. Sure, the results are better than using just digital zoom but still, there is plenty of noise and the images lack detail.
You can also take black and white pictures, which look okay but I’m not a huge fan of black and white photography, anyway.
Selfie image quality is just mediocre. Sure, they are usable for social media but what bothers me the most is the red tint in most of the shots.
The Doogee Mix can shoot videos in 4k resolution but I think this is just an upscaled 1080p footage. There is a decent amount of detail but in general, the videos don’t look good because there is a lot of choppiness and shakiness and the EIS feature does not help at all.
The 1080p video does not look as choppy as 4k and I would rate the quality as average. What disappoints me the most if the lack of continuos auto-focus feature and the footage could look sharper.
The selfie video looks just horrible since it is only in 480p, at least this is what the stock camera app allows. Also, the sound is being recorded only to the left channel, which is again, really disappointing.
Download full resolution camera samples
MULTIMEDIA and ENTERTAINMENT
The Doogee implemented a loudspeaker on the bottom and the quality of it is just average, to say the least.
Same can be said about the quality of sound via the headset jack.
CONNECTIVITY
The Doogee Mix has a hybrid dual-SIM card tray that can take either 2 SIMs or 1 SIM and the microSD card. Also, the phone has most of the needed sensors like gyroscope, proximity and so on.
When it comes to connectivity, the Wifi speed and range are good and the GPS is accurate. The signal reception is good and the call quality is decent.
BATTERY LIFE
The phone has a 3380mAh battery that will let you use the phone for the entire day but not more, at least this was my experience. I can’t tell you the exact screen-on time due to a software bug but I would say that the phone will get you about 5 hours of SOT.
Finally, it takes about 1,5 h to fully charge the phone with the supplied fast charger.
CONCLUSIONS
So, there you have it, the Doogee Mix. The phone indeed offers quite a lot of value for the price but as usual to the cheap phones, it has a few shortcomings to consider.
The phone is definitely a looker, the gaming performance is great, the display is awesome and the battery life is decent.
However, I was not impressed by the overall camera performance, the user interface is not as smooth as it should be, the loudspeaker quality is mediocre and finally, I will let you decide if the phone is truly bezel-less.
In conclusion, the Doogee Mix is definitely an exceptional budget phone mainly because of its near bezel-less display but hopefully, we will see a few software improvements that will unleash a full potential of the phone’s hardware.
