Oukitel WP35 review: It's a wallet friendly 11,000mAh rugged phone with 5G support

Oukitel reached out asking if I was interested in reviewing the WP35. It's another chunky and rugged smartphone, it sits in the lower-end segment relative to pricing of other rugged phones I have tested, but does include 5G connectivity.

First up, let's dive into the specs:

As you can see, here we have a rugged phone on the lower end of the pricing ladder that supports 5G. I've put the full bands it supports in a table below.

The colors offered on the product page along with the option for a U.S., EU, or U.K. charger in the box are "Coffee" (which looks light brown or gold in color), Grey, and Green. Ours is the green 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, Oukitel 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 360g, it is 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 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 and polycarbonate materials the company used. However, there is also a clear TPU case shipped with the WP35, and it also came with a preinstalled screen protector.

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 mono speaker was also loud enough when I switched the phone to hands-free speaker mode.

Design

Oukitel says that this phone was made from "Dual color injection molding + Aluminum titanium alloy" the former I am going to guess is color-injected plastics for the rear shell, along with the metals used for the rest of the phone. The display looks like it is raised, but the entire front has a slightly raised rubber border going around the entire display at around 1mm height, probably to protect the glass if laid down flat on its display.

On the rear, you will find the camera array which consists of a 64 MP main camera, along with an 8 MP Night Vision camera, and a 2 MP Macro camera. To the left of the top camera is the infrared night vision lighting and to the right an LED flash. The back has a plastic feel to it, with a textured finish. It feels good in the hand, if not heavy, there's also a lot going on with the sides, 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 18 W Fast charger. There's no headphone jack here, so you would be limited to wired (USB Type C) or Bluetooth v5.2 connectivity. To the left of the tab is a mic hole, and to the right there is the single speaker grill.

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 WP35 does not have any openings and is mostly smooth except for the indented indication of IP35 certification, which protects it from "tools and wires greater than 2.5 millimeters." and "from high pressure water jets from any direction." This was most likely included as previous rugged phones that I have reviewed did not have this certification.

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 bit of a letdown, since we have yet another rugged phone with an IPS screen that natively does not support an Always on Display, so having a notification LED would have been a good trade-off.

The WP35 includes a 6.60-inch screen, which is only a tiny bit smaller than the Oukitel WP27's 6.8-inch screen. The extra 250mAh of battery capacity in the WP35 didn't increase its size at all, resulting in an even thinner 14.8mm phone at its thinnest point, and slightly shorter 172.2mm vs 178.2 for the WP27 overall. Although the weight feels like it is distributed evenly across the phone, the camera hump results in a thickness of almost 2cm when the phone is lying on a flat surface.

Display

The 6.60" FHD+ display has a 1,080 x 2408 screen resolution, with a 400 PPI pixel density, a 20:9 aspect ratio, and Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection. Oukitel claims the display has a 450-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.

It's not fancy by any means, but I don't 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 16:19 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 64 MP rear PDAF shooter with an F/1.9 ± 5% aperture and 79.8° FOV made by Sony. There's also a (Hi-846W) 8 MP wide-angle camera with F/2.0 ± 5% aperture and 75.2° FOV, along with a 2 MP depth camera with an F/2.2 ± 5% aperture and 76° FOV.

Unfortunately, there's no optical image stabilization (OIS), which is a common omission on cheaper phones. However, the main 64 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: WP35 main camera in daylight

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 Oukitel, Blackview or Doogee rugged phones, seemed to oversaturate the colors a bit, and I was extremely surprised at the result of pictures taken in shadows, which came out looking like it was heavily overcast thundery weather. The bottom left image in the above grid is such an example and was shot in the same hour as the others.

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: WP35 main camera at night

At a certain moment, I gave up taking pictures outside, not only could I not see what I was taking a picture of on the display unless it was brightly lit (such as with the single example in the bottom row of the above pictures), it was also incredibly hard to take any pictures in focus. I dumped a few that I took which ended up being trails of lights, probably because I moved a bit while taking the shot, even so I did not have this issue in the daytime.

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. For comparison, the last photo in the above row was taken with the Night Vision camera with the blackout blinds pulled down a bit

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 WP35 ships with Android 14 with the March 2024 security update, which is only a few months 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 WP35 ships with Android's own Quickstep launcher by default, Oukitel also included "EasyLauncher" which frankly 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 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 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.

Performance and Battery Life

The phone offers charging through the wall charger at 18W and no wireless option, and with an 11,800 mAh battery. Oukitel claims that it takes four hours to fully charge it at 18W, I received mine at 80% and after two days of benchmarking, camera, and media use I'm only down 12% from that.

The official web page claims 60 days on standby, 75 hours of call time, 60 hours of music, 12 hours of gaming or streaming, and 15 hours of video playback, but I haven't had this phone long enough to check. It's an 11,000 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.

It's good to see it can hold its own against... quite old competition such as the 2015 released NVIDIA Shield Tablet, or the 2016 Samsung Galaxy S7. It's okay for light gaming, that's about it.

Next up, I ran Geekbench, which returned a score of 683, which came in 47 points lower compared to the Oukitel WP27 with a Helio G99 SoC in Single-Core, and 120 points lower at 1911 (compared to 2036) for Multi-Core. These CPUs continue to remain in the bottom area of the benchmarks.

Last but not least, the AnTuTu benchmark tests, came in at 375,592 points, which is 25861 points lower than the Oukitel WP27. I wasn't able to see how it ranks in comparison to other phones, because AnTuTu has removed that stat from the benchmark app.

The Oukitel WP35 includes the MediaTek Dimensity 6100+, which is an 8-core chipset that was announced in July 2023 and is manufactured using a 6-nanometer process technology. It is comparable to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 5G, although it does not best it in any way.

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 360g. 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. 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.

This phone isn't going to break the bank at the (as of writing) discounted price of $299.99, which is the cheapest 5G rugged phone I have tested so far. However, for that cost, 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 on a budget with the low-range SoC, and "only" 8GB/256GB of RAM and storage, along with a 60Hz display up front. It's a passable device in tough working conditions, and I have to give praise for the Night Vision camera, the others, which are passable if not a bit over-saturated and you don't care about taking night photos, it's definitely okay for daytime work related use.