Introduction
Rugged phones are about as niche in the consumer tech sphere as you can get, and yet they still have their loyal following. It’s a mystery to most of us why you’d choose a smartphone that’s as thick as a brick when most, if not all, of its features are matched by a regular phone these days. But for certain professions they do make sense. And if a rugged phone is what you want, then Ulefone is likely a brand you are familiar with.
Enter the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro, the rugged phonemaker’s latest and possibly most outrageous phone yet. We’re not even sure if calling the Armor 34 Pro a phone is the most accurate choice of words – it’s also a projector, a camping light, and with a 25,500mAh battery inside, it’s mostly an external battery pack! Note that there’s also a non-Pro Armor 34 that’s essentially the same phone but without the projector.
Despite its diverse set of skills, the Armor 34 Pro isn’t outrageously expensive. It’s €650, $574/$700, £600, INR 81,500, and you get 512GB of storage, and a lot of value!
Unboxing
For the price, you’re getting a generous kit. Ulefone ships the Armor 34 Pro with a 66W power delivery charger, a USB-C cable, a wrist strap, and a tempered glass protector.
Unboxing the Ulefone
Design and handling
The Ulefone Armor 34 Pro is a big phone, no two ways about it. It’s more T34 than Armor 34! It weighs about as much as a Soviet tank, too, at 825g. Girth is a 90s telephone territory – 32.7mm.
As you can guess, the Armor 34 Pro is a well-protected phone. It comes with IP68/IP69K water and dust protection, as well as MIL-STD-810H for drop and shock resistance and extreme temperatures.
Using the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro with one hand may be an issue for some. Not only is it heavy, it’s also big, and you’ll find it hard to reach the farther corners of your screen unless you use two hands.
But that’s to be expected. This is a huge beast of a phone, and it’s packing niceties like the 1,100 lumens light on the back!
The camping light, as Ulefone calls it, consists of 585 LEDs and gets incredibly bright – 1,100 lumens, as we mentioned. You can set the custom key on the left side of the phone to turn the light on. The camping light has a few modes and a granular brightness control.
You can have the light on, choose to have it blink rapidly, there’s an SOS function, and there’s a weaker mode to prolong the battery life.
Funnily enough, if you tap the Flashlight toggle from the notification shade, it turns on the dual LED flash and not the camping light!
The camping light on the back is very strong
Controls-wise, the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro is fully featured. On the left, there’s a Ulefone uSmart Connector 2.0 accessory port for endoscope cameras and the like, the big, textured Custom Key, two round and tactile buttons for the volume, and the SIM slot.
One of the two speaker grilles sits on the right, under it, there’s a power button that doubles as a capacitive fingerprint scanner, and at the bottom, there’s another custom key, this one opens the projector by default, and is also a single-press camera button.
Buttons on the sides
The projector is on the top. There’s a built-in dual fans that run when the projector is on, and are quite loud.
The 3.5mm audio jack and USB-C port are on the bottom under a hard-to-open plastic cap.
The USB-C and 3.5mm audio jack cover is hard to open
Projector
The projector is possibly the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro’s most intriguing feature. It’s a DLP projector capable of 150 lumens and a resolution of 854x480px (480p). It can project from 30 inches all the way to 100 inches from a distance of 2.9 meters.
The projector supports automatic focus and rudimentary keystone correction (manual vertical keystone adjustment of up to ±40°).
It’s tough to make minute changes to the angle of projection by propping the phone with random objects. We think Ulefone should make a tripod mount accessory for the Armor 34 Pro, which would make it much easier to use as a portable projector – the standard phone holders we use for tripod mounting can’t fit the phone due to its impressive girth.
Note, you should place the phone on its back when projecting
The unit has 100% offset, meaning it can project even when you’ve put it flat on a surface – no need to tilt the device.
The image you get from the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro’s projector is good! Given complete darkness, the image is colorful, but we found it a bit dim. Still, it’s a portable projector mounted to a phone! Sharpness is adequate as well.
We were able to clock 7 hours and 15 minutes of projection from a local video file on the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro. Projection stopped once the phone hit 10% battery remaining.
Cameras
The Ulefone Armor 34 Pro has a triple camera on the back and a 32MP selfie camera on the front.
The main wide-angle camera on the back has an impressive 50MP 1/1.3-inch sensor with an f/2.0 lens. There’s another 64MP 1/2.0-inch night vision camera with 4 infrared lights and an f/1.8 optic. And the third camera is a 50MP 1/2.76-inch ultrawide with an f/2.2 lens.
Despite the relatively big sensors on hand, the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro’s output fails to impress. Resolving power isn’t great – textures aren’t very sharp – dynamic range is limited with blown-out skies, and the white balance is off, leaning too green in one instance, then too magenta in another.
Ulefone Armor 34 Pro: Main camera • Main camera 2x zoom • Ultrawide
The limited dynamic range is in full display in these video samples we shot on the Armor 34 Pro. Also, the lack of stabilization is fairly obvious.
Ulefone Armor 34 Pro: Main camera • Main camera 2x zoom • Ultrawide
On the upside, you can use the stellar camping light as a camera flash!
Battery life and performance
Given the mammoth 25,500mAh battery on tap, you can expect some impressive endurance out of the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro. And indeed, we got stellar web browsing, video playback, and gaming runtime from the rugged beast. The Armor 34 Pro was able to run our web loop for almost 57 hours straight (56 hours and 49 minutes)! Even more impressive, we got almost 60 hours of video playback at 59 hours and 34 minutes!
Finally, the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro managed 32 hours and 31 minutes of gaming.
When it comes to performance, the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 is a known quantity. Here, it’s packaged with 16GB of RAM. The CPU has 4x 2.5 GHz Cortex-A78 cores and 4x 2.0 GHz Cortex-A55 cores, while the GPU is the Mali-G615 MC2. The SoC is a good performer, giving out similar performance to the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 in CPU tasks and slightly lower graphics performance.
Conclusion
You might think that the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro is quite unique in its set of skills, but there are some rivals to it out there. You could find a rugged phone with a projector and a big battery, but the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro is seemingly the most complete such package to be had.
Having it isn’t as hard either. The phone is on sale in a number of markets at a reasonable price – €650, $574/$700, £600, INR 81,500.
We say reasonable, because you’re getting a lot of value for your money. A projector you can have anywhere with you, a massive 25,500mAh battery, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and a big 6.95-inch 120Hz display is a solid start.
The stellar camping light! And the camera system that, while not the best-performing, is nice to have, especially the night vision camera.
So if you’re into rugged phones and want to spice up that upcoming camping trip, the Ulefone Armor 34 Pro may be just what you need!
Ulefone Armor 34 Pro
We may get a commission from qualifying sales.
