YotaPhone 2 review: Choose a side

Gallery and Photos

Android 4.4 KitKat offers two gallery apps - the default Gallery and Photos.

The Gallery app shows all of the photos on your phone sorted by albums. There is a pop up menu, which allows sorting you images by time, by album or just limit your image access to camera roll.

The Gallery app

There are lots of sharing options, plus a capable integrated image editor.

The Photos app is the latest gallery app Google is trying to push lately. It integrates with Google+ and can backup your images automatically to your Google+ account if you like. It also shows all the photos from your online albums.

Photos gallery

If you sign in with your Google+ account and allow your photos to be backed up in the Google cloud, you can also use the Auto Awesome feature - it auto enhances your photos and combines similar photos and videos as events in a cool way - it either exports a collage picture or a motion gif.

Video player integrated within the Gallery

The video player has retained its stock Android interface and it is perfectly usable out of the box - it plays DivX, Xvid, MP4, WMV and MKV files up to 1080p resolution.

The multi-channel AC3 audio tracks are not supported though, which makes the MKV compatibility pretty much obsolete. MOV files aren't supported either.

Video player

Streaming videos to a Wi-Fi enabled TV is available. One way to go about this is to share your multimedia content over good ol' DLNA technology OR you can mirror your device's screen to the TV via the Miracast protocol (by casting your screen as it's called in the options menu of the latest Android KitKat).

Play Music with equalizers

Google's own music player called Play Music handles your music collection. It features the spanking New Listen Now feature, which tries to determine what you like and the sequence of your track-changing so that it can start offering you music you might like to play next.

Play Music

Google Play Music also gives you the option to upload music onto the Google-branded cloud and stream it on your device via Wi-Fi or mobile data. There's also the nifty option of downloading the content onto the device if you want to have there for connection-less times.

Equalizers

From the Settings key you can get into the equalizer. It can be turned on and off and features several equalizer presets along with a custom user defined one. If you plug in a headset, you can also play around with the Bass boost and 3D effect sliders.

FM radio with RDS

The FM Radio is a pretty straightforward affair. Once you plug in a pair of headphones (to act as an antenna), the app will scan the stations available in your region. You can also input the region manually if the app doesn't configure it correctly.

There is RDS support, too, as well as FM recording.

FM radio

Audio quality is great, volume levels disappoint

The YotaPhone 2 produced nicely clean output in the first test (the one where it's connected to an active external amplifier) and got excellent scores top to bottom. Unfortunately, its volume levels were below average, taking a few points away from an otherwise great performance.

Plugging in a pair of headphones only damages the stereo crosstalk and not too badly, so again you are left with pretty good clarity. The low volume levels issue persists though, suggesting you better not use too powerful headphones as the YotaPhone 2 simply won't be able to handle them.

And here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
YotaPhone 2	+0.03, -0.31	-92.1	88.8	0.0049	0.0095	-90.7
YotaPhone 2 (headphones attached)	+0.24, -0.33	-91.2	86.9	0.0079	0.018	-53.4
Samsung Galaxy Alpha	+0.01, -0.04	-96.6	92.8	0.0058	0.0091	-97.1
Samsung Galaxy Alpha (headphones attached)	+0.04, -0.01	-95.7	92.7	0.013	0.033	-65.6
Samsung Galaxy S5	+0.02, -0.08	-96.3	93.3	0.0017	0.0089	-95.2
Samsung Galaxy S5 (headphones attached)	+0.01, -0.08	-96.3	93.3	0.0095	0.018	-61.9
HTC One mini 2	+0.02, -0.09	-94.8	93.8	0.010	0.011	-93.5
HTC One mini 2 (headphones attached)	+0.08, -0.03	-94.9	93.8	0.028	0.022	-90.1
Apple iPhone 5s	+0.02, -0.05	-93.6	93.7	0.0013	0.0068	-90.3
Apple iPhone 5s (headphones attached)	+0.12, -0.00	-93.4	93.3	0.0016	0.060	-76.1

YotaPhone 2 frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.