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PT ~ 5/10/2025 00:00 PT #aliexpresshaul #Aliexpress
Hey, it’s Adrian and if you’re looking for a smartphone around the $200 US mark, it’s worth checking out the Ulfo Note 17 Pro because it has a beautiful 6.78 in curved AMOLED screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate, an IR blaster to control household devices, fingerprint and face unlock, a 108 megapixel main camera, a 550 MIA battery, always on display, 12 gigs of RAM, and a MediaTek Helio G99 CPU. There’s also NFC functionality. Now, all that sounds pretty good, but there’s a couple of things that may or may not be deal breakers for you. So, let’s take a closer look at how well it performs. And a big thanks AliExpress for sending this out for review. Right now, they have a ton of sales going on both on smartphones and a ton of other products.
So, I’ll leave links in the video description and pin comments if you want to check that out. But, let’s get into
Package Contents
the video. In the box, we have the Ulfhone Note 17 Pro TPU case, charging brick, USB type-C to type-C cable, SIM eject tool, manual, warranty card, and
Design
more. The design looks pretty nice, and it feels well built, too. It also has a little bit of a heft coming in at 196 g or 0.4 lb. We also have the curved 6.78 in AMOLED screen, but I do feel like the curvature is a little bit too extreme where it actually kind of disrupts how text looks if it sits on that curvature. The screen is made with Corning Gorilla Glass 5 and we have around a 93% screen to body ratio. There’s tactile button presses, the microphone port and IR blaster at the top. At the bottom, we have a speaker grill, the USB C port, and SIM card tray. The top of the screen has a slim front-facing speaker grill. And then on the rear, we have that dual ring camera module with 108 megapixel main camera and 5 megapixel macro with LED light. There’s also a 32 meap front selfie camera.
This phone is splash resistant, but there’s no official IP rating, so keep that in mind. I have the pearl white version of the phone, which has this type of sparkling glimmering type finish, but it does come in other colors as well. The screen is a 6.78
Screen
inch curved AMOLED screen with a peak brightness of 500 nits and around 388 PPI, so fairly sharp for video and text. Now, video looks pretty vivid thanks to the AMOLED display. And there’s great contrast ratios in dark areas as you would expect. And at 120 Hz refresh rate, the screen is pretty fluid. Now, there’s options to lock it in to 120 Hz, 90 Hz, 60 Hz, or you could use the dynamic refresh rate as well. So yeah, having an AMOLED screen up to 120 Hz refresh rate is fantastic to see on a phone at this price. And it also has always on display. You can customize that how you see fit. You know, it could be on all the time. You could schedule
Performance
it to be on. The Yolo Phone Note 17 Pro is running a MediaTek Helio G99 CPU. And for everyday use, it actually does the job pretty well. Opening most apps for the first time is usually pretty quick within 1 to two seconds. and you could have a bunch of apps open in the background thanks to the 12 gigs of RAM plus the additional 12 gigs of virtual
Dealbreakers?
RAM. Let’s talk about one of the deal breakers that I mentioned. So, this has 256 gigs of storage and there’s no way to actually expand that. There’s no micro SD card slot on here. The other thing is that this is locked to Android 13. Right now, at the time of this video, we’re on Android 15. So, if that matters to you, just keep that in mind. Now, this is running a Mali G57 GPU, and I did put this through some benchmarks. Now, it didn’t do very well, but considering the price of this, it’s not really meant to dominate benchmarks. But let’s talk about gaming performance
Gaming
next. So, you’ll be able to play a lot of casual mobile games without any type of issues. But if you want to run higher-end titles like Call of Duty Mobile or Genchin Impact, if you want smooth FPS, you will have to lower the graphics settings. So, I found myself having to go to either lowest settings or kind of low to medium just to ensure smooth and fluid gameplay. Hey, but at least it actually ran it. It didn’t crash. It didn’t overheat significantly. So, let’s talk about thermals. So, when
Thermals
gaming, of course, without the case applied, the phone got warm or a little bit hot, but not hot enough where it was uncomfortable to hold or where I was worried. So, the ambient temperature before I started any type of gaming and benchmarks, I would say, is between 23 to 24° C. And after about 20 minutes of, you know, mixed use gaming and benchmarking, the highest that I saw it jump up to was around 36 37 C, which is still pretty manageable. You can use
Unlocking
face unlock and fingerprint unlock to unlock the phone. Now, most of the time I use the fingerprint unlock and it was a pretty decent speed, which it unlocked and fairly accurate as well. There’s
IR Blaster
also an IR blaster at the top. So, I used the control app in here. I set up my LG TV under a minute and I was turning my TV on and off, changing the volume from a good 15 ft away. Super cool feature. There’s a 5,50 mAh battery
Battery
in here and we have a max of 33 watts of fast wired charging, but there is no wireless charging and you can easily get full day battery life out of this phone because we’re not running, you know, a super powerful CPU or GPU like on most flagship phones. So, it’s really going to come down to if you’re using kind of, you know, that dynamic refresh rate, if you’re locking it to 120 Hz, and of course, what you have the screen
Speakers
brightness set [Music] to. The speakers on here get plenty loud. Of course, it’s not the most well-rounded type of sound. It does lack a little bit of bass and treble, but it’s good enough overall. Now, if you’re going to be using wireless earbuds or headphones, really no issues at all. And this actually did come with a pair of wireless earbuds. I just haven’t reviewed those, but let me know down in the comments if you’d like to see a review of those as well. In terms of the haptic, so it’s not as tight as I would like. So, you could probably hear this. So, you can hear the vibration motor going. So, the haptic feels like a little bit weak and a little bit too prolonged for my liking. So, probably something I’m going to turn off just to save battery life.
Anyway, in terms of connectivity, so we have support for two nano SIM cards in the SIM card tray. This also supports dualband Wi-Fi and up to 4G LTE speeds. All right, let’s talk
Cameras
about the camera experience because this may be one of those potential deal breakers. So, on the rear, we have a 108 megapixel main lens and then we have a 5 megapixel macro lens as well. And then on the front, we have a 32 megapixel selfie cam. Videos have a max resolution of 2K at 30 frames per second. Now, when shooting video, I did notice that the focus or the autofocus, I actually had to kind of hunt around anytime I was kind of panning at a decent speed. So, I did have to manually tap on the screen to kind of manually focus it. But, for tripod uses or static shots, there’s going to be no issues. And when taking photos under ideal lighting, the Note 17 Pro actually takes nicely exposed photos and fairly clear as well. But in low light situations, it definitely struggles.
And I also found the same thing with the autofocus being a little bit slow to focus when I move from subject to subject. I also noticed that the image processing tended to oversaturate colors a little bit more than the true tolife colors. So just keep that in mind. So the camera experience on the Ulfo Note 17 Pro is a little bit of a mixed bag. If you have, you know, fairly decent lighting most of the times and you’re doing static shots or, you know, shots where there’s not a lot of, you know, action or fast movement, it’s going to be perfectly fine.
But if you are going to be doing, you know, kind of quick panning or you’re jumping from subject to subject really quickly, or you kind of want to use this for a vlog where you’re walking, talking, and just kind of, you know, moving the camera around to show what you’re talking about, the autofocus is likely not going to keep up. You’re going to have to tap on the screen to manually focus. And when you do that, that introduces a little bit of camera shake. The other thing is even on the videos, there’s not a lot of stabilization on here. So that’s something else to keep in mind. And there is no optical zoom as well. So it’s all going to be digital. So definitely if you’re a heavy camera user, this is likely not the phone for
Recommended
you. So if you’re looking for a brand new phone around the $200 US smart, the Ulophone Note 17 Pro actually offers pretty good value if you’re able to compromise in a couple of areas. It’s great having a 6.78 in AMOLED screen running at 120 Hz refresh rate. There’s 12 gigs of RAM plus another 12 virtual RAM and IR blaster which is really handy. Good battery life and decent overall daily performance. But you’ll have to compromise on not being able to play all mobile games at max graphics settings. And you will find the camera experience a little bit lacking with the slow autofocus and the max recording resolution of 2K at 30 frames per second.
So, if you’re interested in picking up the Ulf Note 17 Pro, I’m going to leave some coupon codes down below along with links to pick yours up at AliExpress. And if you’re looking for something with a little bit more specs, AliExpress has hundreds of other phone models to choose from as well. And if you know of any other smartphones around the 200 US that you think offers great value, let me know down in the comments below. If you found this video helpful, would you mind liking and subscribing? It truly does help me out quite a bit. And stay tuned. I have more upcoming cell phone and phone accessories videos. And while you’re at it, maybe consider checking out some of my other tech reviews. I review a bunch of different things. Headphones, earbuds, laptops, monitors, mechanical keyboards.
Really something for everyone. I hope you’ll join me in my next video
Please note that some of the links in my video descriptions are affiliate links where I earn from qualifying purchases. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
