Durable for under 2000 kroner
The Ulefone Rugking 2 Pro is a durable mobile phone that is surprisingly light and flexible, and also cheap. The disadvantages are everything else.
All other mobile phone manufacturers have several different brands, so why not Ulefone? The Chinese manufacturer in and of itself specializes in extra durable mobile phones and it is not obvious to me what distinguishes the durable mobiles in Ulefone’s Armor series from their Rugking series. However, it is clear what distinguishes the Rugking 2 Pro in particular. It is a durable mobile, IP68/69K, it can withstand high-pressure flushing and bathing with it, and it must also withstand falls from a height of 2 meters. This without the phone being particularly large or heavy. This, moreover, with a price tag of less than SEK 2,000.
Of course, this has to mean trade-offs elsewhere, and somewhere else turns out to be everywhere, but if we start with the exterior, it looks like durable mobile phones usually do, that is, like a drill hammer, black rubber plastic with a very grip-friendly structure, shock-friendly corners and a rubber edge around the slightly recessed screen. The charging connector is behind a cover. There is no headset socket, but a loop to attach a strap to, and an extra button that you can program a function on. For example, you can program it to act as a camera button when you use the phone underwater.
It is not exactly a light mobile, rather not much heavier than a normal mobile. It’s plenty in this class, and the phone doesn’t feel bulky in your trouser pocket.
Low resolution screen
The screen is unusually small for a mobile phone today. Since the mobile phone itself is not unusually small, this means a lot of black surfaces on the front of the mobile phone. That the screen has a low resolution doesn’t bother me that much, but it is an LCD display with a fairly low maximum brightness so it is difficult to use outdoors. It refreshes slowly and the image gets blurry when you scroll. So not a very good screen, but it does the job.
If the screen is not directly a limitation, the same cannot be said about the performance. The Unisoc T7250 platform is a two-year-old budget chipset. 5g support is missing, and performance is among the lowest of any phone I’ve tested in the last two years. It can be seen, for example, in how long it takes to start the camera app or how tough the phone is when it starts. But most of the time it is less noticeable than expected. The latest mobiles I tested with performance in this class felt significantly tougher, here I rarely get the feeling that the phone does not respond when I press a button.
This is probably because the system mercilessly limits multitasking so that the app in the foreground gets all the processor resources. It’s a reasonable priority with this limited performance, but be aware that apps that need to run in the background may not always be synced when you launch them, and must be synced manually.
Updated system
The phone’s system runs Android 15 out of the box, but actually gets an update to Android 16 once I boot it up. In this price range, you can’t count on system updates at all, and I have no information that Ulefone promised several system updates. The system has a classic Android interface, and Swedish language support is no problem. Or, a bit of a problem, sometimes various functions, especially in the settings, are incorrectly machine-translated so you may have to guess what they do.
The phone doesn’t have a fingerprint reader, so you need a code, swipe or face unlock to unlock it, but it does have NFC, so you can use it to make payments in stores.
Ulefone usually has various fancy heat or dark cameras in its models, but this is not the case with the Rugking 2 Pro. There is only one camera on the back here, and it also has a small, low-resolution sensor. The best thing I have to say about the camera is that the colors come out quite nice in sunlight. Images will not be sharp if you enlarge them to 100 percent, and in high-contrast conditions the image will be overexposed or underexposed. Dark photography is definitely not Rugking 2 Pro’s branch.
Ulefone usually has huge batteries in their mobile phones, which weigh accordingly, but Rugking 2 Pro has, as I said, a more flexible format, and the battery is accordingly. The battery life is still clearly approved, over 12 hours of screen time in our battery test.
The Rugking 2 Pro is not exactly good at anything, but it copes with everything I try to do with it, and if you then take into account a price tag of under 2000 kroner, it is actually one of the better mobiles I have tested at that price. That without me taking into account that it is an extra durable mobile, which is the whole point of the Ulefone Rugking 2 Pro.
Questions and answers
Can you take pictures underwater with the mobile camera? Yes, you can, but the camera isn’t great to begin with.
How is the speaker sound? The phone has a mono speaker with a fairly high maximum volume, but not very good sound quality.
Is the phone more waterproof than regular mobiles? No, the water protection class IP68/69K also has many ordinary mobiles today, but a guarantee for falls from a height of 2 meters is not part of the norm.
An alternative
Should it be a mobile phone for under 2,000 kroner, the Xiaomi Redmi A7 Pro is still a bit cheaper than the Rugking 2 Pro, but it also feels significantly slower.
Camera example
As long as you don’t zoom in and the lighting conditions aren’t too difficult, you can get perfectly fine photos in daylight.