Armor 27T Pro has great hardware and pretty amazing battery life, if you can deal with the absurd weight of the device. However, the software operating system and system apps have made the phone unusable for me in just a few months.
After months of trying to get this Ulefone Armor 27T pro working properly, it has some major drawbacks that have made me switch to a different phone.
I use Signal, Textra, Whatsapp, Telegram, Instagram and Gaia GPS regularly, and these all have issues.
For Textra, if the app hasn’t been started lately, text message simply do not arrive at the phone. They end up in a black hole somewhere. Open textra and look at it, and send a text to it, and it works fine. Close textra for a few hours, and send a text, it never arrives, even after reopening the app.
Likewise with Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram, Instagram, after sitting idle for a few hours, you can send a message to them, and there will be no notification. Only after you check the app will it poll for undelivered messages and then notify you.
With Gaia GPS, It’ll work fine for 20 minutes of a trail run, then stop working. When I reopen Gaia GPS to check or to finish my run, it will have continued to count the time taken, but the GPS will have stopped working, and the mapline will instantly teleport from where it stopped working to where I am now.
Now, I have spent months on forums, youtube videos, and discussing it with app publishers, but no amount of editing battery optimization settings, enabling or disabling apps in duraspeed, or just all-out disabling a raft of system apps, (Including com.pri.screenoff.killer) has resolved these issues Here are the list of bloatware and pest apps that I’ve disabled or uninstalled:
Disabled:
https://i.postimg.cc/GtTP47vw/2025-12-18-07-46-29-Universal-Android-Debloater.png
Uninstalled:
https://i.postimg.cc/SRQs5JND/2025-12-18-07-46-46-Universal-Android-Debloater.png
There are a few other annoying things about the software, but they would be ok if I wasn’t losing basic app functionality, and especially text messages disappearing into the aether.
I’ve bought an alternative phone, and I’ll probably keep the Ulefone and use it only for its thermal camera, endoscope and microscope, maybe as a hammer too, but its not usable in daily life.
At this point, despite the hardware being pretty impressive, and the price being reasonable, I must strongly recommend against buying a Ulefone device.
It is actually really cool. I thought I was being a bit extra getting a phone with a thermal camera and endoscope, but it’s been immensely helpful in restoring an old motorbike, finding heat leaks in my house, and putting together a custom passive heatsink for my raspberry pi.
It also supports reverse charging, so being able to use my phone to charge my wireless earbuds, headphones, and even someone else’s phone has been super helpful when travelling and hiking, because I don’t need to bring a spare battery bank.
It’s infrared blaster also allows me to control my TV, air conditioner, and other people’s RC devices (like the digital displays in shopping centres 🫢) from a single app.
It’s a real shame that it seems so insistent on cutting me off from my friends and family though. I have family that only use SMS, cousins that only use insta, friends in groups that only use WhatsApp, and other friends that only use signal, so to stay in touch with everyone I have to use all these.
It’s also not much good as a hiking companion if I can’t reliably record my track when walking.
Most phones, I wouldn’t have even bothered to spend this much time to get it working the way I like it.