In the year 10 B.I. (Before iPhone), the smartphone market was emerging from the primordial soup of personal digital assistants, cellphones and ‘gadgets’; there were hundreds of alternatives with keyboards, number pads, flips, folds and slides, and at least five unrelated operating systems. Looking back, it’s almost shocking how, like fireflies, those screens flickered into brightness and disappeared – leaving just a handful of almost identical tablet-style options and just two app ecosystems to choose from.
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That doesn’t mean that variety has disappeared entirely, and Doogee has quietly been building a range of solid smartphones you’ll tend to find being sold directly from China on AliExpress or similar, or via Amazon resellers. Prices vary a little, but they’re all considerably cheaper than an iPhone’s cash price (the difference being that you finance the iPhone via the network provider, of course).
For example, the S98 reviewed here is the latest generation of Doogee, and it’s under £300 with four cameras, 8GB RAM and an 8-core processor, 256GB storage and a large 6.3-inch, 1080 x 2340 pixel display. Interested?
Doogee S98 – rugged smartphone, 2022-style
Rather than slavishly copying the iPhone/Samsung style, the S98 is a proper ruggedised phone that looks like it’s already wearing an accessory case. Remember those JCB-esque old-school phones for building sites? This is the same idea but in mini-tablet style. The corners are substantial bumpers, there’s a protective lip around the screen, and it comes with a screen protector already applied (no bubbles) with a spare in the box.
Although it’s a lower-cost device to buy, the build quality is hard to fault and it’s powered by a reasonably quick 8-core ARM processor, with two high-performance cores and six medium-performance ones, backed up by a 2-core ARM Mali graphics processing unit (GPU) for gaming. It has the latest version of Android, 12, with few customisations or irrelevant extras, no attempt to hide it and pretend that it’s Doogee’s own OS. It is very responsive, configurable and adheres to all the guides and instructions you’ll find for Android, including the inevitable easter eggs.
On the back, there’s a secondary circular LCD that can show calls, control music playback or display a variety of animated clocks. It’s surrounded by cameras, but these all have different specifications. The primary camera is a 64Mp module, with a 20Mp night-vision and 8Mp wide-angle to cover alternative views, and the front-facing camera is 16Mp.
The phone features fingerprint scanning with a pad on the side, wireless charging and a reasonably generous 6,000mAh battery that easily handles a couple of days of fairly intensive use and well over a week of just ‘being on and available’. The wireless charger seems a bit hit-and-miss and only behaved with one of the three pads I have, due to the placement of the camera which lifts the phone up slightly.
This may also be due to the 33W wireless charging capability, which needs a chunky PSU to deliver if the pad isn’t negotiating the rate properly. We’d recommend doing a bit of research before buying a pad for this. It’s a big, long handset (19:9 screen ratio) and struggles to fit in many car wireless charger bays, though it is more than happy in the typical third-party wireless charging phone holders you can buy with clamps on the side.
There’s a USB-C port behind a port cover so you can plug it in to charge and copy files over or use accessories such as external displays, audio interfaces or controllers. There’s no headphone port, but of course, the phone has an up-to-date Bluetooth setup, so the world of cordless headsets is at your disposal. Unlike many lower-cost devices, the hands-free speaker is more than good enough for music playback and gaming; it lacks the spatial separation and clarity of the iPhone (this may be adjustable through EQ) but can deliver a similar volume and depth of bass without distortion, despite the rather obvious ‘the speaker is in this corner’ setup.
Doogee S98
Price: RRP £339.99 | VIEW OFFER
Rugged – for hiking, outdoors and adventures?
When you consider the cost of a dedicated off-road sat nav such as the Garmin Overlander, the S98 makes immense sense even ignoring its ability to act as a phone. Not only is it just as rugged as the navigation devices (if not more so), the entire ecosystem of Android navigation tools is at your disposal.
That means Ordnance Survey maps, off-road driving data via the sensors in the phone and OBD-II modules, direct access to the Green Lane Association’s Trailwise 2 maps via the browser (with live location and log in all working correctly), almanac data for photography and planning sunset/sunrise and lighting. Like any smartphone, it’s got a wealth of information available online available wherever you have a signal, so hiking recipes, survival tips, to-do lists, and travel recommendations are all in one place.
Battery life suggests that you could do a couple of days hiking with moderate use of screen and media. It’s quite capable of sitting on standby (even with apps running for notifications and similar, and availability on Bluetooth for linked devices) for well over a week, showing 29% after eight days.
Cameras – seeing the invisible
Smartphone photography has almost eliminated the once booming market for compact digital cameras, and whether the technology is genuinely comparable doesn’t matter – buyers are happy with the images they get, and Apple put a lot of weight behind marketing the legitimacy of smartphone video and photography which in turn, benefits the whole segment. It helps that it’s one less device to remember, and can share directly into social media apps, but the quality is still important.
Doogee equips the S98 with four cameras, three of which surround the secondary display. The 64MP one is a standard 90-degree field of view, with F1.8 aperture and phase-detection autofocus. It’s backed up by an autofocus 8MP 130-degree, F2.2 wide-angle module and autofocus 20MP F1.8 infrared night-vision camera. This can be used for infrared landscape photography as well (something that requires specialised film or modified digital cameras usually), but at night it’s reliant on a fairly short pool of light from the infrared illuminator.
At present, it doesn’t contribute anything clever for single images captured using the overall camera array, but infrared does have scope for skin-smoothing and tones in portraiture. There’s some untapped potential there. Speaking of portraiture, the front-facing camera is a 16MP 80-degree F2.0 unit with a nice colour rendition.
With the standard camera app, there are a few modes to choose from, including up to 2K video. HDR and Pro modes, Panoramas and even GIFs, but the 64Mp sensor is almost overkill. It has to downsample the image to make it small enough to process, yet the software wants to make a 64Mp (9248 x 6944 pixel) file regardless, so there’s a lot of processing going on for no improvement in quality.
Third-party apps may improve this in future (currently they cannot see the hardware of the S98’s cameras, so there’s no raw capture and only the pixel-binned resolution of 16Mp (rear) or 4Mp (front) is offered), but its particularly noticeable in lower-light situations where your eyes adjust but the camera’s working much harder than you expect, such as in a shaded room – the noise-reduction is quite strong.
Fewer, larger pixels is generally the better approach unless you need immense files to print a banner advert or crop tiny sections from, and you’ll find plenty of jagged edges or ‘painter’ effect in the details here; however, the 64MP camera has one trick that makes it worthwhile – digital zoom. Switch to the far-more sensible 16MP ‘saved’ file size of 4608 x 3456 pixels, and things get sharper. Like any gadget, learning the settings will yield the best results.
In good light, with the camera held steady, the 4x ‘crop’ zoom will give you that 16MP file with much better detail than cropping from a 64Mp file. You won’t be submitting the results to a stock library, but it’s still impressive for the cost of the device. Likewise, there’s a rather excessive 87MP UHD mode, which seems to process a couple of captures into one; it’s hard to find a good reason to use it.
Night vision can prove useful – you can look inside cavity walls or find things in a tent when camping without using a torch. For looking around your garden and wildlife spotting it’s a little less impressive because the LED simply doesn’t have the reach; however, you could always get a more powerful infrared torch.
The wide-angle camera is also pleasing. With just 8MP to play with it’s crisp, without excess compression, and it can focus quite close. Some details could be better but that seems to be part of the compression again, so third-party apps may unlock better captures.
While it’s not quite up to the polish and speed of an iPhone or Google Pixel, the Doogee’s camera app and setup are considerably better than most Android phones.
Call quality – this is still a phone!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s little to mention about calls and signal quality. The S98 delivers on this most fundamental, yet increasingly overshadowed aspect of ‘a smartphone’ very well, offering dual-SIM features without having to lose the expanded storage to fit the second SIM, and call quality and speaker quality are great.
Contacts and details are synced with Google, so that’s all straightforward (readers with a long memory might remember the delights of ActiveSync or getting a Nokia to talk to a PC; between them, Google and Apple have eradicated this technical challenge once and for all). As with most of the S98, Doogee has left Android 12 well alone and has not felt the need to try and personalise it, so it’s intuitive, fast and rock solid with plenty of online guides and assistance to help you get the most out of it.
Conclusion: Should you buy a Doogee S98?
Yes. It’s robust, it’s fast, and it’s powerful enough for most games and apps – including handling the full music production suite of Roland Zenbeats and some faster console-style racing games with intensive graphics. We haven’t pushed it to the cutting edge of smartphone gaming, but at this price, it’s overdelivering on expectations. In a month of real-world use, it has not only delivered the basic reliability you would hope for from a brand-new phone, but it also impressed on many occasions, from the stability and reliability of the fingerprint logins, and the speed when running work profile Office apps, to the solidity and colour depth of the camera array.
That it achieves all this for one-third of the price of a similar iPhone, or around half the cost of big-brand Android units, is truly exceptional. And they don’t come pre-wrapped in a rugged shell or have such original design touches as the secondary display and night vision camera.
We’ve tried to find flaws, setbacks, and weaknesses in the performance of the S98 and have simply been knocked back every time – and rationally, can’t think of any reason to spend more on an Android handset if you put functionality ahead of brand image or your individual style (the cyberpunk-angularity of the Doogee is quite appealing, after all).
Score: 5/5
Doogee S98
Price: RRP £339.99 | VIEW OFFER
Pros
• Dependable
• Loaded with the latest tech
• Really good value for money
Cons
• Not one for brand snobs
Specs
Screen 6.3-inch, FHD+
Platform Android 12
Memory 8GB RAM, 256GB ROM
Camera 64MP AI camera, 8MP wide-angle, 20MP night vision, 16MP front
IP rating IP68
Colour Red, Black, Orange
Weight 320g
More items to consider:
Google Pixel 6
Price: £449.99 | VIEW OFFER
HUAWEI P30 Lite
Price: £269 | VIEW OFFER
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