LYF Water 9 8GB

Just like all the Chinese phone manufacturers, LYF is focusing more on hardware specifications of the smartphone rather than focusing on software and after sales service. The LYF Water 9 is a sleek and beautiful looking smartphone device. The device has an all-metal body in a Golden finish. On the front, the bezel around the display is almost non-existent and the device looks similar to the Google Nexus 4. The device measures 153.5 x 77.8 x7.9mm and weighs 168g.

The display of the LYF Water 9 is covered by Asahi Dragontrail Glass. The Dragontrail Glass is not as scratch-resistant as the Gorilla Glass, but it provides better durability. The display is a 5.5-inch Full HD unit with IPS technology.  The LYF Water 9 has a 5MP secondary camera and a traditional 13-megapixel primary camera with contrast-detection autofocus. The primary camera can capture HDR images as well as GIFs; it comes with a dual-tone LED flash. The selfie camera is a 5MP unit with fixed focus.

As mentioned in the introduction, LYF focuses more on hardware rather than on software. Hence, the LYF Water 9 comes pre-installed with Android 5.1 Lollipop OS. Google had launched the Android 7.0 Nougat in August 2016, but manufacturers like LYF are still using the two years old operating system. Although, the customised UI comes with gesture controls, and a fingerprint based application locking software. The LYF Water 9 is definitely not a smartphone for gamers. The hardware is not powerful enough to handle heavy games at its native display resolution. The phone is powered by the MediaTek MT6573 chipset; it has an octa-core processor, a Mali-T720MP3 GPU, and 2GB of RAM. The inbuilt storage of 16GB is expandable via a microSD card.

Most of the LYF smartphone devices have a less battery capacity, and the LYF Water 9 is not different; it has a 2,800 mAh non-removable battery that can be charged through a microUSB cable. The connectivity is where the device excels, the LYF Water 9 supports dual-SIM 4G LTE, VoLTE with HD voice, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, and USB OTG through its microUSB port.