Ulefone handsets are now commonly available in South Africa, so hopefully the brand will launch its new Armor 27T Plus and Pro Plus handsets here in the near future. The lineup adds camera options we’ve seen in phones before — night vision, infrared, and thermal cameras — but it’s always cool to see the options appear in other venues.
As you might expect from the name and feature set, these are rugged phones from Ulefone. They join the existing Armor range (you can buy a Ulefone Armor X32 today for R3,800 if you can’t live without a 20MP night vision camera), but these newest handsets offer more advanced versions of its existing camera tech.
The Armor 27T’s night patrol
The Armor 27T Plus will ship with one of MediaTek’s Helio G99 chipsets, with the Pro model upping processing to a Dimensity 6300. Both phones share the same display (6.78in, 1,080 x 2,460), RAM allocation (12GB), and storage (256GB), as well as their IP68/IP69K and MIL-STD-810H ratings for waterproofing and toughness.
In terms of specs, these phones aren’t all that different from the older 27T Pro lineup from Ulefone. The new ‘Plus’ suffix seems to cover an improved FLIR Lepton thermal camera that uses the company’s 3.5 version tech instead of an older 2.5 camera. Either way, it’s packing a larger 160 x 120-pixel thermal sensor, used to detect heat variances wherever you need it. We’ve used these to take photographs of handprints on a wall at night before. It’ll probably work better at detecting leaks than just goofing off, though.
You needn’t wait for Ulefone’s incremental upgrade if the smaller thermal sensor isn’t your biggest ask. The same 50MP main and 64MP infrared/night vision sensors are already available in the standard Ulefone Armor 27T Pro, which retails for R15,650 in SA. If a FLIR thermal sensor seems like an extravagance and you’re okay with whatever ThermoVue is, the Armor 25T can be had for just R9,000.
