Gadgetory

smartphones are getting more expensive year after year samsung's asking over $900 for its note 8 device and Apple's asking over $1000 just to get your hands on the iPhone 10 and while most of these flagships are asking more and more from your wallet there are a couple of manufacturers who are trying to swoop in and fill that budget gap Doogie is one of these companies they've probably never heard of Doogie but that makes sense there aren't exactly the type of company who wants to spend a ton of money on marketing their new mix phone may not have the best cameras or prettiest screen on the market but it does have a lot of the fundamentals that make a pretty good smartphone and for $200 that's really all we could ask for this is the mix by Dookie now you've probably already noticed but the Dookie mix isn't exactly original it's really anything but if you took a shammy me mix and you shrunk it down to about 3/4 of the size this is probably what you would get it's got that same candy bar style all-metal design with a lot of screen in the front and it even shoves the front facing camera into the bottom right just like a Shou but isn't to say that the Dookie mix doesn't have its own set of features though it's got a fingerprint reader in the front and even as dual cameras in the back to compete with the other top dogs on the market now these aren't exactly the best components that I've ever used but honestly they work pretty well and for $200 what more could you really ask for there's dual speakers in the bottom of the device which are good enough for what they are and there's even a headphone jack peeking out from the top talk about premium in terms of value you're actually getting quite a bit there's four to six gigs of RAM and 64 to 128 gigabytes of storage depending on the model you get and the octa-core Helius processor it actually competes pretty well against Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 doogie even include one of those ring holders which are also popular in Asian markets though their packaging could have been a little less risque usability wise this phone holds its own pretty well it's running a custom OS called duty OS which is based on Android nougat and the tweaks they made are actually pretty useful Yogi's got a custom theme store which lets you quickly tweak the style of your phone and it changes everything from the wallpaper to the icon borders if you swipe to the left from the home screen you'll also get a custom curated newsfeed with five different categories and while I enjoyed it you can take that as you will besides these tweaks this is pretty much stock Android you get all the settings that you get into regular nougat device and I've actually already received four security updates in the last week or so I've spent with it now this wouldn't be a $200 phone if it didn't have some trade-offs first of all the company is using microUSB to power this thing and while this doesn't really disrupt the usability of advice I would have liked to see USB type-c in order to keep it more up-to-date it also uses the USB 2.0 standard so if you're trying to use a wired connection to transfer data over this thing you're gonna have to wait a while the cameras are also very so-so there's a sixteen and eight megapixel shooter on the back and while I appreciate the 1 into X optical zoom the photos that came out were pretty grainy and muddy these dual cameras can pull some fancy tricks like they emulated depth of field that are popular in a lot of flagships these days though it does it a lot worse than something like the Galaxy Note 8 that being said Doogie did include some fun filters and even a pro mode in this phone which allows you to tweak individual settings like ISO and aperture the photos also look a lot worse on the phone than they do after you transfer them to a better screen so don't judge them immediately after you take them this brings us to the biggest feature and compromise of this phone which is the display it's clearly copying the me mix in terms of form but its resolution is the thing that took the biggest hit this is a 720p screen and while you think that might ruin the phone completely I would actually disagree sure you're not gonna be doing VR on this thing but for a 720p screen it actually looks pretty good it's made by Samsung and uses AMOLED technology so you're still gonna get darker blacks than you would on any LCD panel for most of the tasks you're probably gonna be using this phone for it you likely won't be disappointed though things like Instagram or snapchat are obviously gonna take a hit okay I hear you you're a bit bummed out about the screen but having less pixels to push actually pairs extremely well with the massive battery in this phone the Dookie mix is sporting three thousand eight hundred and eighty million hours of power which is more than a lot of flagship phones can brag about these days I got a solid day and a half using this thing as my primary device though I was on Wi-Fi most of the time because it only has one band that supports 3G in the United States if you're in the UK or some other places this thing will pick up a lot more 4G frequencies but my fellow US residents will probably want to look elsewhere the Dookie mix isn't the most premium phone on the market by a longshot it's missing a lot of the extra bells and whistles that make these current-day flagships worth the extra cash what it does have however is a lot of the fundamentals that make a smart phone really fun to use on a daily basis and for $200 I really couldn't ask for that much more if you liked this review make sure you head over to the full article where I've broken this phone down in a lot more detail and stay tuned to Android Authority comm because of course we are your source for all things Android