Doogee S98 is a rugged smartphone that won't hurt your pocket
Doogee S98 dual screen rugged smartphone. Picture Noel Campion.
Rugged smartphones are big, bulky, and sometimes a little unwieldy and that’s everything the Doogee S98 is but also much more. Good performance isn’t just measured on how fast a phone is, or how many megapixels the cameras have and while the S98 isn’t going to compete against a flagship's raw power, it does offer toughness and endurance at an affordable price.
The S98 has an industrial styling that doesn't stray from the Doogee design language that we’ve seen on several of the companies' previous smartphones. While not everyone will appreciate the small screws on the side rails or large rubber bumpers on the corners, everyone will appreciate just how tough the S98 is including the Corning Gorilla Glass that protects the front and rear displays. Yes, the S98 has a rear display but more on that later.
At 320g, the S98 is heavy and chunky at 15.5mm thick.
It has a large 6.3-inch display with a dew drop cutout for the front 16MP selfie camera.
Under the hood, there’s a massive 6,000mAh battery along with a 33W charger that comes in the box to top it up quickly. It’s also nice to see 15W wireless charging present.
The left side has a dual SIM card slot that is protected with a seal around the tray. Doogee supplies a small plastic level tool to open this. On the same side is a custom ‘easy key’ that can be set up to open an app, start a screen recording or take a screenshot with a single, double or triple tap.
On the right side are the power, volume up and down buttons as well as a fingerprint reader which I found I needed to do a few times to make it more reliable.
On the bottom edge is a thick rubber flap that protects and seals the USB-C port and a mono speaker that produces decent volume but not-so-great sound quality.
The S98 has been rigorously tested to conform to IP68/IP69k and MIL-STD-810G standards which means it’s drop-proof from a height of 1.5m, and waterproof at a depth of 1.5m and protection from dust.
The S98 comes with 8GB of RAM and a generous 256GB (UFS 2.2) of storage with the option of further expanding this with a microSD card up to an extra 512GB. Powering this is the MediaTek Helio G96 CPU and Arm Mali-G57 GPU. The G96 is a mid-range processor which doesn’t come near the performance of a modern flagship. This means apps will launch a little slower and switching between apps doesn’t feel as smooth as you’ll get on more expensive handsets with faster chipsets.
Unfortunately, there’s no 5G support but you do get NFC for contactless payments.
The S98 comes with interesting cameras including the 64MP main camera, a 20MP night vision camera, an 8MP wide-angle and finally, the 16MP selfie shooter.
The night vision camera works well and captures unusual infrared black and white images. The results are interesting and I can see someone with a creative flare getting great use of this.
The main camera is capable of capturing excellent detail with good colour accuracy in good light. In low light, the image quality drops and motion blur can become an issue.
You can also use night mode and while this produces clean noise-free images, the sacrifice is the aggressive noise reduction that also reduces image detail.
The 8MP wide-angle camera is fine in good light but isn’t as good as the main shooter in overall image quality.
Video capture is limited to 2K and the quality is fine in good light.
The 6.3-inch front display is a FHD + LCD panel with a peak brightness of 480nits. It comes with a pre-installed screen protector and an extra one in the box. Viewing angles are excellent for an LCD and the colours look vibrant. This is one of the better displays I’ve seen on a phone in this price range but don’t expect the quality you can get from a premium OLED panel in terms of contrast, brightness and those inky blacks.
One of the selling features of the S98 is the rear circular display which can show the time with a selection of three clock faces, answer a call or control media playback. While it’s a neat party trick and it does look cool, functionally, it’s very limited. Perhaps in time, Doogee may upgrade its usefulness via firmware or software updates but for now, it’s not a reason to buy this phone.
The Doogee S98 is a rugged phone in every sense of the word with excellent features for those who need a phone that can take a lot of rough and tumble. The battery is good enough to last average users at least two or even three days. Overall performance is adequate for everyday tasks and even some light gaming.
For those on the market for a rugged phone that looks good and comes with a lot of great features, it’s hard to look past the Doogee S98. See Doogee for more.
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