Phone and toolbox in one

Review: Ulefone Armor 27T Pro - Massive Multitasker

In many ways, this phone is so much more than a smartphone. Sure, it weighs as much as two phones, but you get 5G, a large screen, apps, and Android, so most of what you can expect from a smartphone today, but also much more than that.

Erik Mörner

Published 24 January 2025 - 15:41 Modified 24 January 2025 - 16:24

Most of all, the phone feels like a toolbox with a built-in smartphone. The foundation here is durability and that you should be able to take it with you wherever you go. This means that this is a substantial piece. It fits in a jeans pocket, but it's hardly a phone that easily slips into a jacket pocket.

Thermal and Night Vision Cameras

Armor 27T Pro offers a lot that regular phones don't give you. Durability, of course, but also several tools that are useful for those who need a durable phone. You have the thermal camera that allows you to detect leaks, electrical faults, and so on behind walls. It's also easy to see if someone has recently sat on the couch, discover where the cat has hidden in a dark room, or see someone hiding behind a curtain. You get a clear color-coded image where you see cold and heat in different colors, and you can also get an estimate of the temperature to the exact degree with a sight in the middle. The resolution of this thermal camera is low, and you only get the contours of the subject along with the color scale indicating the temperature. The camera is supposed to handle from minus 10 to plus 450 degrees according to the specifications, but when I test with the stove plate, it seems to rather stop at 150 degrees. However, that's more than enough for the uses you have for the camera. In addition to this, the phone also has an infrared night vision camera that allows you to get sharp, good images even in total darkness, though only in grayscale. Still good for distinguishing details where the naked eye is not enough. Both thermal and night vision cameras work for both still images and videos.

Around the edges of the phone, we can identify a number of other special uses. Here is a memory card slot, a quick button you can customize yourself, use for example for walkie talkie, here is a connection for accessories in the form of special cameras and here is an IR transmitter so that the phone can act as a remote control. On the back of the phone, there is support for wireless charging at 30W, almost as fast, 33W that you can charge with a cable, and it is also possible to use reverse wireless charging so that you can place another phone, certain smartwatches, or a pair of headphones on the back and charge them from your Armor 27T Pro wirelessly. By the way, you can also use the camera underwater. The touchscreen is not used then, but after you activate the camera's underwater mode, you start and stop recording using the phone's physical buttons on the sides.

The phone as a phone

If you look at the Armor 27T Pro as I have described it, as a toolbox with a built-in phone, it is interesting to see what that phone can do. We can note that the screen has a generous 120 hertz refresh rate, and the interface flows well when I browse through menus or web pages. It's not lightning fast, as the performance here is about a third of what a top phone offers, but it works and is not noticeably sluggish. The screen is okay, it's not an OLED screen but still, as mentioned, adequate.

The phone comes with Android 14, so not the latest version, and Ulefone does not give any clear promises about the number of updates we can expect. However, with the features delivered in Android, the impression is good. I can ask questions to Google Gemini Live here in the same way as I can in the newly released S25 and get answers directly, I can use all apps from BankID to Spotify, to Netflix, so it provides a good basic function.

The fact is that the Armor 27T Pro is significantly cheaper than I would have guessed, considering that it is a mobile phone and so much more.

Questions and Answers

What does the Android version look like?

A lot of useful small apps come with it so I can measure angles and height, remote control, FM radio, and so on, but at its core, the system is quite stripped down.

How are the cameras?

The main camera is a basic camera, 50 megapixels resolution, which neither has wide-angle nor optical zoom. It has good color reproduction in good conditions, but it might not be something you use to capture the most important moments in life. Especially in poorer light, it quickly loses quality, so then you have to switch to the night camera which only does grayscale.

Proper speakers?

Loud sound, yes, but the speaker is located down in the corner so no stereo effect and hardly any refined sound either. Good for hearing the ringtone, worse for listening to music.

An alternative

We should be clear that this is an extreme phone. You can get similar basic functionality in a phone that is not rugged and which then costs perhaps half of what this one costs.