Micromax and Cyanogen signed a partnership agreement recently and announced their plans to release a Cyanogen-powered phone. This handset was expected to carry the “YU” brand, which is basically Micromax’s sub-brand, a separate company founded by Micromax that is. This company announced an event a couple of days ago and said that it will take place on December 18th, which is today. Well, the phone just got announced, as expected, so let’s check out what it has to offer.
This smartphone is called “Yureka” and it ships with CyanogenMod OS 11 pre-installed on top of Android 4.4 KitKat. The handset features a 5.5-inch 720p (1280 x 720) IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass protection on top of it. This smartphone is powered by Qualcomm’s 64-bit Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor (quad-core 1.7GHz ARM Cortex A53 & quad-core 1.0GHz ARM Cortex A53) which ships with an Adreno 405 GPU for graphics processing. 2GB of DDR3 RAM comes with this device and you get 16GB of internal storage here, which you can expand via MicroSD card. 13-megapixel camera rear-facing with 5P (5 plastic elements) lens and Sony’s Exmor R sensor (f/2.2 aperture) is located at the back of this handset and it can shoot 1080p at 30fps and 720p slow motion video at 60fps. On the front of this device you’ll find a 5-megapixel OmniVision 5648 sensor (4P lens, 71-degree wide viewing angle). This is a dual-SIM device which comes with 4G LTE connectivity. Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS are also here, of course. 2500mAh battery ships with this device and the handset measures 154.8 x 78 x 8.8mm.
Yureka is going to be available in Moonstone color and will be priced at Rs. 8,999 ($142), which is an extremely affordable price. This handset will be available exclusively on Amazon.in and you’ll be able to reserve a copy starting on December 19th at 2PM (local time). The device will be available for purchase in the second week of January 2015 and will be available for purchase online only. The company will also sell a leather cover and tempered glass for this device, though those will come separately. Yureka comes with an unlockable bootloader and the company said that rooting the phone won’t void your warranty, which is great. You can also expect them to release kernel source code in the coming weeks.
