Doogee V Max Plus review: it's a 22,000 mAh 5G rugged phone with a 200MP shooter

Doogee is back with another chunky and rugged smartphone, and like we have seen a couple of times already this year, this phone supports dual 5G, but also includes WiFi 6 as well as some flagship-type specs with regard to the mega 200 megapixel camera.

First up, let's dive into the specs:

As you can see, 5G is finally becoming mainstream on rugged phones. I've put the full bands it supports in a table below. Although the MSRP is listed as $599, as of writing, the official page has it knocked down to $499 when you apply the EARLYBIRD100 coupon. Considering this phone came out in May, which was last month, that early bird coupon could expire at any time.

Another thing I wanted to note is that this phone uses LPDDR4X rather than the newer LPDDR5 memory, however after doing some researching online, it appears that although LPDDR5 is vastly more power efficient (and about 1.5X faster), you only start to see those benefits when lower amounts of RAM (like 2, and 4 GB) are used. Secondly it is a bit disappointing that the older UFS 2.1 storage was used, since UFS 3.1 is twice as fast, but it is what it is.

The colors offered on the purchase page are simply called "Black" or "Gray", but in the description materials they are called "Obsidian Black", and "Pewter Gray". Don't let this confuse you, because as you will see, the aforementioned colors are simply accents. Both options are a fully Black phone, but with black or gray accents on the rear. Ours is the Obsidian Black variant.

We're not getting flagship features here in terms of a display or processor power, but like we've seen in other rugged phones, Doogee doesn't skimp on the rest. There's ample RAM and storage, and that storage can even be expanded with an SD card on this model.

Day 1

The first thing anyone will notice when unboxing it is the weight. At 536 g, it is darn heavy. Switching between this and my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra was a fun experience. I'm a big lad with big hands, but this presents a challenge to use one-handed for any length of time.

Like all the other rugged phones I've tested, I was allowed to throw this thing around, but I was more worried about the damage I could do to my own floors. Dropping it from about a meter at a nearby work site (top pic with the rubble) did not result in any damage to the phone, which is the minimum expectation you should have for it anyway. There were also no scuff marks that I could see after dropping it a few times, which is good news for the metal, polycarbonate and "resin" materials the company used, although a screen protector was shipped in the box, this is the first rugged phone I have used where one wasn't already preinstalled.

I made a few calls on it, and the call quality was excellent, but that's the minimum you should expect from any phone. The speakers were also loud enough when I switched the phone to hands-free speaker mode.

Design

Doogee does not disclose the materials the phone is made from on its website, but my contact told me that polycarbonate, metal and resin was used. The display is not only protected by Gorilla Glass, but also but a small raised border that encompasses the entire front at around 1mm height, this should protect the glass somewhat, if laid down flat on its display.

On the rear, you will find the camera array which consists of a massive 200 MP main camera, along with an 20 MP Night Vision camera, and a 8 MP Macro camera. To the left of the camera array are a couple of LED flashes and to the right, the the infrared night vision lighting. The back has a plastic feel to it, with a textured finish. It feels good in the hand, if not quite heavy, the sides are mostly smooth except for the buttons and corners, but it gives a feeling of a good grip when holding the phone, no complaints here.

On the right side of the phone, you will find two volume buttons and a power key that doubles as a fingerprint sensor. The keys have a good height and are easily detected by feel. Only the power and fingerprint sensor button is completely smooth, all the other buttons have some sort of texturing.

On the left, you'll find the SIM card tray which is protected against water ingress by a rubber seal around the SIM tray. A fingernail is enough to pry it free from the bezel. Below that is the User-defined key, which has a textured finish. I will talk about that a bit later.

On the bottom, you'll find a rubber tab access for the USB Type C charger port for the included 1 m USB Type C-to-USB Type C cable and 33 W Fast charger. There's no headphone jack here, so you would be limited to wired (USB Type C) or Bluetooth v5.2 connectivity. Above the tab are dual speaker grills.

The tab access was easy enough to use with my large fingers and short nails, which is great if you're in a hurry and on the job, which this phone is absolutely suited to in terms of usage.

The top of the V Max Plus does not have any openings and is mostly smooth except for a small indent at the top center of the handset and another set of speaker grills aong the top.

On the front of the device above the display, you'll find the 32 MP front-facing camera. There is no notification LED on this rugged phone, which is a common letdown on these phones that should be suited for an industrial outdoor setting, reason being, it's an IPS screen that natively does not support an Always-on Display, however there is a notification LED on the back which I will talk about later.

The V Max Plus boasts a 6.58-inch screen. When it comes to its size, this thing is chunky at 26.3mm thick, it is so thick, there's not even a camera "hump" on this phone, however my contact told me the thickness and weight all comes down to the massive battery, which is twice as large as the one in the Oukitel WP35 rugged phone. Even so, the weight feels like it is distributed evenly across the phone.

Display

The 6.58" FHD+ display has a 1,080 x 2,408 screen resolution, with a 401 PPI pixel density, a 20:9 aspect ratio, and Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection. Oukitel claims the display has a 400-nit peak brightness. However, I found it difficult to view the screen in bright sunlight. It was perfectly fine when I was shooting pictures indoors or in the shadows.

One thing that did bug me was the quality of the screen. Despite having a setting of 60Hz, 90Hz, or 120Hz, which is the only thing you can configure about the display, whenever I scrolled the screen it seemed to distort wildly. I am used to see text blur a bit when scrolling, but this seems over the top. The colors also seem a bit bland, add to the fact there is no setting for colors at all. It's a bit disappointing, I made a quick short of the issue. If you can see what I mean from the compressed video upload to YouTube, in real life it looks even worse.

The display is nothing to write home about, but It's not as if I plan to consume media at 4K HDR anyway. The display is passable. As with most smartphones with a pinhole or teardrop camera, media such as YouTube defaults to a 16:9 aspect ratio which puts black bars on the left and right of the video, but you can pinch out to fill the screen if you want, personally I find it distracting to stretch the media over the default values.

Cameras

As I have said in previous smartphone reviews I've done, I am no camera buff. I'm a point-and-shoot kind of guy, but it is clear to me that smartphone makers seem to want to concentrate a hell of a lot on camera quality, sometimes at the expense of other features, and here it is also no exception. On the rear, we have a 200 MP rear PDAF shooter with an F/1.95 ± 5% aperture and 85° FOV made by Samsung. There's also a (SONY IMX350) 20 MP wide-angle camera with F/1.8 ± 5% aperture and 79° FOV, along with a 8 MP wide angle and macro camera with an F/2.2 ± 5% aperture and 125° FOV.

Unfortunately, there's no optical image stabilization (OIS), which is a common omission on cheaper phones. However, the main 200 MP camera includes PDAF (phase detection auto focus), which is a high-speed automatic focus technology. Most of the daylight pictures I took were in focus, which is a first from my previous experience with different rugged phones.

Google gets around the lack of OIS on its Pixel phones by using the gyroscope for stabilization, but if this tech is included here, it isn't disclosed.

Gallery: Doogee V Max Plus camera by day

As you can see in the above photos, I was blessed with lovely weather, so as long as the sun was behind me while taking the shot, the images came out well. Closeups, as I have seen in other Doogee, Oukitel, or Blackview rugged phones, seemed to over-saturate the colors, which on this phone seemed to be turned up to eleven. The good news here is that the cameras performed remarkably well when pictures were taken in the shadows. There's no audible click or noise when the picture gets taken, so a few shots (not included) were just blurs, as the PDAF had not yet completed.

Some photos were difficult to take because even with the adaptive display outside, at full brightness, still made it hard to see what I was shooting.

Gallery: Doogee V Max Plus camera at night

Taking pictures at night was an experience, this is actually the first rugged phone I have tested in which the flash (which was set to Auto) actually worked, so although at times I could I not see what I was taking a picture of on the display unless it was brightly lit; it was still incredibly hard to take any pictures in focus due to the fact that it sometimes took up to or more than five seconds before the photo was snapped. You can clearly see above that closeups, where the flash had an effect came out better than any night scene I tried taking, in which the flash was totally ineffective.

Even so, this is still the best result I have seen on any rugged phone camera, but you can also see it still needs work. The blurred photos up above, is me moving away thinking the picture had already been taken, because as I said, sometimes it took more than five seconds to actually photograph something, which is unacceptable.

Gallery: Night Vision camera

The Night Vision camera is excellent, if not a bit grainy. It can be accessed right from the default Camera app, so no digging around for an obscure app that would need to be used. I was quite surprised at how good it was in my pitch-black bedroom.

My verdict on the camera is that it will serve you well during the day if you have steady hands, and it's absolutely suited for Night Vision captures, or even using it to navigate dark spaces.

Software

The V Max Plus ships with Android 14 with the May 2024 security update, which is only a month old. However, in terms of software updates and support. You can expect a security update maybe once every quarter, and a warranty that lasts for one year.

The phone comes with a mostly stock experience, with Quickstep enabled by default.

The User-defined Side Key can also be found in the Android Settings under "Gestures and keys". It lets you assign predetermined actions (see above image) or an app to the key on 'One click', 'Double Click', and 'Long Press'. I set 'One Click' to launch the camera, but it is nice to see that all actions or apps can be assigned to each key mode.

The "Toolbag" tool has a few apps grouped together like 'Compass', 'Mirror', which is literally just selfie mode, 'Sound Meter', and height and level tools. It certainly does not have the sensors to back these as professional tools. It's a fun mixed bag of quickly accessible tools in the absence of the proper professional ones.

Although the V Max Plus ships with Android's own Quickstep launcher by default, Doogee also included "EasyLauncher" which you may remember from the Oukitel WP35 review, frankly it is a weird mashup of iOS and Windows Phone, swipe right and you get a screen where you can add a bunch of your favorite contacts, swipe right and you can pin your favorite apps. There are no settings that I could find for EasyLauncher, and it still wasn't clear how I was supposed to access my installed apps (pin them all?) as can be seen in the above screenshots, newly installed apps are also not added to the swiped right "apps" page.

Do be aware that if you switch to EasyLauncher to check it out, you will also be moved over to the '3-button navigation' so if your preference is 'Gesture navigation' you will be required to switch back to it in the Android 14 settings.

Light Realm (Notification LED)

With the absence of an AMOLED display here, there is still no notification LED on the front of the V Max Plus, which I find to be a let down on any phone that does not support Always on Display. However, around the back there is a limited set of notifications called "Light Realm" for some reason, that cannot be modified (although each setting can be toggled off). From left to right, the lights on the back light up and pulse according to the following conditions, incoming call, SMS, music playback and charging, which is definitely better than nothing. There are also effects similar to charging when powering the phone on, and when there is a low battery.

Performance and Battery Life

The phone offers charging through the wall charger at 33W and no wireless option, and with an 22,000 mAh battery. My contact at Doogee told me that it takes 4.5 hours to fully charge it at 33W, which sounds about right. I received mine at 95% and after two days of benchmarking, camera use, and media use I'm only down 9% from that.

The official web page claims 64 days on standby, 156 hours of call time, 142 hours of music, 18 hours of web browsing, and 45 hours of video playback, but I haven't had this phone long enough to check. It's an 22,000 mAh battery though. Of course it's going to last a long time.

For those who love benchmarks, there are a few below. I started off with GFXBench which tests the GPU.

At a best of just 1,064 frames, it's good to see it can hold its own against... the six year old Samsung Galaxy S10+ (1,051) or Galaxy Note10 (1,099). It's okay for light gaming, that's about it.

Next up, I ran Geekbench, which returned a score of 969, which half lower than a flagship phone of 2023. At 2,561 for Multi-Core that's half the speed of last year's Galaxy S23 Ultra. These CPUs continue to remain in the bottom area of the benchmarks.

Last but not least, the AnTuTu benchmark tests, came in at 594,769 points, which is comparable to the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro which came out in 2021.

The V Max Plus includes the MediaTek Dimensity 7050, which is an 8-core chipset that was announced in May 2023 and is manufactured using a 6-nanometer process technology. It is comparable to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1, and even bests it in some ways; however, the Snapdragon is almost a year older and built using the more power-efficient 4nm process versus MediaTek's 6 nanometers.

Conclusion

As with all rugged phones, this has a very specific use case. It is very good at completing tasks where you would be outside, on a building site, or in an otherwise dirty or dangerous environment. Dropping it in such areas, assuming you don't lose it in the process, will likely result in absolutely no damage to the device, although I do wonder how the plastic backplate will hold up after prolonged use and exposure to rough environments.

As I have said in previous rugged phone reviews, you can probably forget about using it as a main phone and sticking it in your Bermuda shorts or pant pockets. If you do, however, the ever-present risk of being pantsied by your own phone will haunt you. This is true even for a big guy like myself. It is properly heavy at 563g. In fact, I opted to keep it in my backpack when I was out shooting pictures with it.

The user-defined Side key is pretty cool for defining your own app or function, and its massive battery is more than enough that anyone can ask for and is actually useful for the reverse charging option. But then there's the poor software support and only one year of warranty backing the phone. As I said earlier, this phone is mostly for specific use cases. I can easily recommend it to construction workers who find it important to have a smartphone on hand, they can toss it around and rinse it under the tap and it will still keep working.

Where to buy, and coupon!

This phone isn't cheap at $599, but right now it is discounted to $499 with the EARLYBIRD100 coupon code. However, for that cost, do keep in mind you can only expect a year of support, plus only around four Android security updates in that year.

This tough package definitely speaks to those in tough working conditions, perhaps with the thought in mind to use the reverse charge option to juice up a laptop or other smartphone. Although the cameras on this rugged phone once again seemed to receive more thought than other useful functions, at the very least and even if the results are a bit over-saturated and you don't care about taking night-scene photos, it's definitely okay for daytime work related use.