At first we would like to thank to GearBest for supplying us with one of their best-selling smartphones at the moment, DOOGEE DG550 for testing and reviewing.

 

 

 

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Product Features:

 

RAM: 1GB (946.54MB available)

ROM: 16GB (14.54GB available)

Gravity Sensing System

FM/MP3/MP4/Bluetooth/GPS/WiFi Function Supported

Note: This phone will only work with GSM+WCDMA networks: GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz WCDMA 850/2100MHz

Unlocked for Worldwide use.

 

Product Specifications:

The DAGGER DG550 smartphone is shipped inside a pretty plain cardboard box, which shows a drawing of the internal components on the top cover:

 

 

 

On one of the box sides, the manufacturer has placed the IMEI numbers and supported frequencies specifications:

 

 

 

The box has arrived fully sealed and also with an authenticity sticker from DOOGEE:

 

 

 

 

If we check the bottom side, we will find more details regarding the smartphone specifications, in multiple languages:

 

 

 

After lifting the top cover, we will find the DG550 sitting inside a red bubble bag, which was included for extra protection during transit:

 

 

 

On the bottom layer of the box we have the rest of the accessories:

 

 

 

Besides the User Manual, the manufacturer has also included an envelope:

 

 

 

 

What does the envelope contain? Well, here we have a spare protective screen for our Phablet:

 

 

 

Besides that we will also get the battery, one USB charger, the USB cable and a set of earphones:

 

 

 

The battery is a 3.7V Li-Po with a total capacity of 2600mAh:

 

 

 

 

The charger has an interesting shape and is painted in two different colors; the DOOGEE logo is, of course, present on one of the sides:

 

 

 

On the opposite, we learn that the charger was manufactured by KVD International Group Limited and is rated on the output 5V, 1000mA:

 

 

 

As with the UMI C1, the DOOGEE DAGGER DG550 is also offered with a non-tangle USB cable, which is easy to use but seems that it is of a smaller length:

 

 

 

The earphones are color-matched with the rest of the accessories:

 

 

 

Besides the bubble bag we have mentioned earlier, the smartphone is also wrapped inside a semi-transparent plastic bag:

 

 

 

What we haven’t found at other manufacturers is the fact that one protective screen has been pre-fitted to the glass, which eliminates the installation hassle; if this one gets scratched we are always free to switch it with the included spare:

 

 

 

Despite of the all-plastic construction, the construction of this specific model seems pretty sturdy and does not produce cracking noises when used:

 

 

 

On the top side of the terminal we have a discrete speaker grill, but also the different sensors like proximity or light sensor. Unlike many models, we will see the frontal camera placed on the left:

 

 

 

The lower portion of the screen comes with the capacitive buttons, which light up only when accessed:

 

 

 

On the sides, DOOGEE has chromed the plastic along with the interface buttons:

 

 

 

 

The bottom area has two additional grills, which mask the microphone orifice:

 

 

 

On the top we have the 35mm jack plug, the USB port but also a small indentation which aids the removal of the back cover:

 

 

 

Speaking of the back cover, here we have a removable top part and the non-removable one located on the lower area, which also holds the speaker:

 

 

 

The speaker is also protected with a thin grill:

 

 

 

Underside the camera lens we will find the flash LED which can be also used as a torch at night:

 

 

 

Despite the use of plastic, a closer inspection of the Power and Volume rocker reveals good quality materials and the paint should not peel off right away:

 

 

 

 

A closer inspection at the dummy speaker ports reveals the microphone orifice which is a bit larger than the rest:

 

 

 

After carefully dismantling the back cover, we will be able to see the rest of the components:

 

 

 

As all Chinese phones we have reviewed in the past, we are again dealing with a dual-sim terminal and supports for the 3G the 850/2100 frequencies, for a wider compatibility. We have a mini-SIM slot, one micro-SIM slot and in the center there is one microSDHC slot available for storage space expansion:

 

 

 

The battery can be installed in a couple of seconds, by following the contacts on both battery and the terminal:

 

 

 

After powering up the smartphone, we will be able to admire the capacitive buttons for the first time:

 

 

 

After flashing the smartphone with the latest available KitKat software release (it was shipped with a modified 4.2.2 release baptized 4.2.9), we were welcomed by a modified launcher by DOOGEE, which had only a few icons brought on the desktop; unlike the other ROMs, we will always see the signal bars of the unpopulated SIM slot, which in our opinion should have had been hidden by default:

 

 

Inside the drawer we have more applications available; an interesting choice of the manufacturer is the replacement of the Stock Android keyboard with the GO Keyboard:

 

 

The MTK Backup & Restore application seems to be back with this release and can only operate when a microSDHC card is inserted:

 

 

Next we could check out the stock Android browser, which works quite good; if you do not agree, you always have the options of using others like Google Chrome, Opera, Mozilla Firefox and more:

 

 

The Calculator is here, as a stock application:

 

 

Same goes with the Calendar application:

 

 

The camera application allows shooting in different modes and does not have extra features besides the MTK default when compared to what we have seen at iOCEAN:

 

 

The Clock application is pretty standard and allows working with alarms, stopwatch and more:

 

 

DOOGEE have pre-installed Documents To Go in its free form for opening different office-type files:

 

 

The default Email application is also present here:

 

 

We can use the File Manager in order to browse the content from the SD Card or Internal Phone Storage:

 

 

FM Radio application will only work when the earphones are connected, since their cable also works as the antenna:

 

 

Next we have the stock Gallery application:

 

 

Of course, the enhanced Gmail application is here for us and will sync right after we have entered our credentials:

 

 

While the GO Keyboard is installed, it needs to be activated by first launching the application and following the instructions:

 

 

In order to find directions, we can always use the Maps application from Google:

 

 

The Messaging app will pick our SMS:

 

 

Next, we have the Music application for playing our multimedia content:

 

 

Here is also a look at the stock dialer:

 

 

The revamped Play Store will update right away with the new look, after we have prompted the necessary details in order to log in:

 

 

The DG550 is also equipped with a Power Saving Management module, which helps to prolong the usage time; we would like to mention that the battery tests we have conducted at the end of this article has all these options turned off:

 

 

The Sound Recorder application did not suffer any modifications from stock:

 

 

The ToDo planner application is to be found on every MTK ROM:

 

 

This also goes for the Torch application:

 

 

If we have videos available on our card or internal memory, they will show inside the Video playback applications, after they have been indexed:

 

 

The main system settings altering application is named suggestively, Settings:

 

 

From SIM management, we will be able to establish each service usage to a separate SIM card, but also work with the Roaming settings:

 

 

Next, we have the Wi-Fi settings, for connecting to different networks with ease:

 

 

Data Usage will show us how much we have used on Wi-Fi and Mobile interfaces:

 

 

Some extra options will be included inside the Wireless & Networks menu:

 

 

In order to customize the sound effects and vibration behavior, we will have to navigate to the Audio Profiles menu:

 

 

DOOGEE has included some custom ringtones inside the ROM:

 

 

Inside the Display menu, besides the usual features we can also enable or disable ClearMotion, a feature coming with the octa-core MTK6592 SoCs:

 

 

The Storage section will help us switch between the Phone Storage and the SD Card as the default write disk:

 

 

When external drives are mounted thanks to OTG support, they will be also shown here:

 

 

The Battery menu allows enabling the CPU Power Saving Mode, battery percentage display and here we will also watch which process consumes battery resources the most:

 

 

The Apps section shows the current available applications, running modules and so on:

 

 

From the Location menu we can enable the GPS for several applications:

 

 

The Security screen is equipped with the usual stock settings:

 

 

Next we have the Language & Input screen where it is shown that we have chosen the GO Keyboard as default:

 

 

Backup & Reset allows resetting the data to the default settings, along with a partial restore:

 

 

Date & Time menu is pretty self-explanatory:

 

 

The Schedule Power On & Off menu is coming with every MTK ROM:

 

 

The Accessibility menu is again, the stock one:

 

 

With the introduction of the 4.4 MTK ROM, there is another available tab inside Settings, Printing:

 

 

Developer Options provides us with some miscellaneous options regarding system functionality:

 

 

Finally, we have the About Phone menu, which allows checking out the Status of the smartphone, the model code number, Android Version, Baseband, Kernel versions but also the Build number:

 

 

The DAGGER DG550 smartphone from DOOGEE is equipped with a MediaTek MT6592 SOC, the same we have seen with the iOCEAN smartphones. This is a true octa-core chip with eight ARM Cortex-A7 application processors clocked at 1.7 and the Mali-450 MP4 GPU cores are clocked at 700 MHz. This smartphone also comes with 1GB of installed memory:

 

 

The System tab will supply us more information regarding the board type, Android version, kernel, resolution, free memory and so on:

 

 

The Battery tab will show the current status; on this model it seems that the temperature sensor is missing since it always shows 25 degrees Celsius:

 

 

The application also shows live data from the pre-installed sensors:

 

 

To test out the performances of the DAGGER DG550 smartphone, we have installed some freeware benchmark apps from the Google Play Store in the internal memory (did not transfer them to a 3rd party microSDHC card, in order not to influence the test results). Afterwards, the applications were ran one-by-one, and we recorded the final scores; the obtained results were also compared with the previously tested systems, in order to spot the performance differences.

 

AnTuTu

 

 

Basemark GUI

 

 

Passmark PerformanceTest

 

 

GFXBench

 

 

Quadrant

 

 

Vellamo

 

 

3DMark

 

 

Real Pi

 

 

The 5.5 inch, 1280x720 resolution IPS OGS screen is of good quality and does not have any issues when viewed from an angle, as it can be seen from the following shots.

 

Again, we can see that the camera sensor number of megapixels is different in the specifications compared to the reality, when checking out RGT_DeviceInfo from the Engineering section. Here we will learn that the back camera is an 8MP OV8825 and in front we are dealing with one 2MP GC2235. Despite the older Omnivision OV8825 sensor, the smartphone can shoot photos which look quite good when the light conditions are optimal, however do not expect miracles at night or in low-lighted areas.

 

 

As always, you can check the unaltered versions at the following Web LINK.

After spending some quality time with the DG550 we could say that this is not a best-seller by chance, since it can deliver quite a bit and despite the use of plastic instead of aluminum as we have seen with the UMI C1, the chromed paint on the laterals is of good quality and should not wear off right away. We did like what DOOGEE have done with the home button, which is represented with a LED which forms light in the shape of a triangle but this same LED could have been also used for notifications when the screen is off since this is what this smartphone model really needs.

 

After the first boot-up, we have seen that the intro animation starts up with a nice music and several actions inside the Android OS are complimented by custom sounds, which tells us that DOOGEE likes to customize a bit the experience it offers to its customers. While the initial launcher is easy to use, we can always install a different one like Apex since this one offers more levels of configuration.

 

All the necessary sensors are now present, unlike the UMI C1, so even the initial lock-on was made in just about 5 seconds, which is excellent. We have done some tests by walking on the street several kilometers and also by bike and the errors reported by the tracking software were quite minimal, so we can say that it works with the same accuracy as the iOCEAN X7S and X8.

 

The larger battery helps getting better screen times, but since the octa-core draws a little more power, we could see a smaller score inside the Antutu Battery Benchmark test:

 

 

 

Despite the Omnivision 8MP sensor for the back camera, it seems that DG550 succeeds to deliver nice quality shots, but it won’t reach the level of the Sony sensor we have seen with the UMI smartphone.

 

Our recent sponsor, GearBest, is currently having a discount promotion for this specific terminal, so if you are interested in acquiring one at a lower price, you can easily click the banner below:

 

 

DOOGEE DAGGER DG550 Smartphone is Recommended For:

 

 

We would like to thank again to GearBest for making this review possible!