Doogee Fire 6 Power rugged phone review

Doogee Fire 6 Power: 30-second review

Not to be confused with the baseline Doogee Fire 6, the Power model is more of a beast and, therefore, won’t easily fit in a pocket. The thinking behind this phone places battery life high on its agenda, and it even comes with a unique reverse charging cable for boosting three phones with what is stored in the Fire 6 Power.

The rest of this phone isn’t spectacular since it used a relatively old SoC that can’t access 5G networks but has WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 connections. While this hardware is encased in a seemingly indestructible case rated for both impacts and even water immersion, the critical features of comms, camera and processor all seem somewhat dated.

Where it shines is being useful in a wilderness expedition, using its massive battery and powerful 12120-lumen flashlight. The camera can take reasonable pictures, but it’s hardly cutting-edge, even though Doogee claims it uses extensive AI technology. To counter those claims, it’s worth noting that the best video capture available is only 1080p 30fps.

Overall, as well-made as the Doogee Fire 6 Power is, the hardware inside doesn’t entirely justify the price point. Therefore, it’s unlikely to be our best rugged phoneselection. I’d only consider getting this if you can find it for much less than the official price. Do not mix it up with the lower-spec basic Fire 6 model.

Doogee Fire 6 Power: price and availability

• How much does it cost? $300/£245/€321
• When is it out? Available now
• Where can you get it? You can get it in most regions directly from Doogee or from many online retailers.

Doogee sells its phones directly, and this one costs $299.99 or £245 from the maker’s website. However, it is also sold through online outlets, and it can be found on Amazon.com for $259.99 in both green and black, making for substantial savings.

But those wanting to get it even cheaper, accepting a longer delivery delay, should search for it on AliExpress, where an asking price of less than $170 or £150 is possible.

Obviously, those prices change the whole argument about value, although I’d expect returning the phone if you have an issue to be much easier through Amazon.

This phone is overpriced at the maker’s asking price, and possibly the Amazon one, but it could also be strongly argued that from AliExpress, it’s probably undersold.

• Value score: 3.5/5

Doogee Fire 6 Power: specs

Doogee Fire 6 Power: design

• Heavy and thick
• Vegan leather
• Reverse charging

When you put as much battery capacity as Doogee placed in the Fire 6 Power in a phone, it is never going to be agile and elegant. Along with the 430g weight, this is a thick device that measures more than 2cm front to back.

Doogee engineers went with the boat hull-inspired shape that is easy to hold and handle, and in most other respects, this is a by-the-numbers design where the buttons are where you might normally expect them.

The placement of the thumb-reading power button on the right is ideal for right-handed people but less ideal for those with the left hand as the predominant hand.

On the left are the custom button and the SIM/Micro SD card tray, which can simultaneously accept two Nano SIM cards and a MicroSD card.

Promoted on the Doogee site is that the back of the phone uses leather instead of GRP or TPU, although this is ‘Vegan leather’, so it’s never seen a farmyard. The review hardware was the black model, and the vegan leather was almost invisible on the back, but in the green model, it appears more striking.

Typically, Chinese phones come with a power socket-mounted charger and a USB-C cable, and the Fire 6 Power has both. However, it also comes with a special charging cable specifically for reverse charging other phones. The cable can distribute up to 18W to three other USB-C-connected devices from the one USB-C power on the Fire 6 Power.

Logically, this concept makes little or no sense. Imagine you are trekking in the jungle, and you are using a phone to navigate to a point where you should be able to get a signal to communicate. You have four phones: the Fire 6 Power and three others. The three others have smaller batteries or didn’t conserve power and are nearly exhausted. Transferring the power from this phone to the other three would be incredibly dumb because, at best, 50% of the power will be lost in reverse charging. Therefore, you just wasted half the remaining power moving it to the other phones. If you want a power pack to charge phones, that makes some sense, but taking power from one phone to another rarely makes any.

One last point about this phone is that promotional images on the Doogee website show the phone exploded. Depending on how you interpret those images, you might think the battery is replaceable. To clarify, it isn’t.

Design score: 3.5/5

Doogee Fire 6 Power: hardware

• Old SoC
• Big battery capacity
• 120 lumen flashlight

Other rugged phone makers are switching to new and interesting processor technology like the new Dimensity 6300 series, a 5G platform with decent performance for those who like to game occasionally.

Doogee isn’t joining that bandwagon on the Fire 6 Power. Instead, it went with the Unisoc T606, an SoC that first appeared in 2019. It’s since been rebranded as the T7200, so look for that on the Unisoc website if you want more information.

This is an entry-level SoC manufactured by TSMC using a 12nm FinFET process, compared to the latest SoCs from Samsung and MediaTek, which use 6nm or even 4nm fabrication.

It fits the phase that SoC makers went through, during which they gave the chips two performance and six efficiency cores to prevent them from getting too hot or consuming excessive power.

The ARM Mali-G57 MP1 is rated at just 650MHz and is, therefore, not ideal for intensive gaming, although it’s fine for working the interface.

The part of this design that isn’t from a previous era is the battery, with a massive 15500 mAh of capacity and 33W wired charging to top it up in a reasonable time period.

There is the previously mentioned reverse charging cable, but you can get much more than 15500 mAh of charging power for less than the price of this phone.

Sadly, there is no wireless charging on the Fire 6 Power.

The only stand-out feature on the outside is two powerful LED bulbs on the top edge, forming a 120-lumen flashlight. Having these in a position where the phone can be held horizontally is superior to having them on the back. In this orientation, you could use the phone to follow a map or compass while illuminating the way.

While there are phones with brighter arrays, this phone’s flashlight is probably one of the more practical implementations.

• Hardware score: 4/5

Doogee Fire 6 Power: cameras

• 50MP and 2MP sensors on the rear
• 8MP on the front
• three cameras in total

The Doogee Fire 6 Power has three cameras:

• Rear camera: 50MP OmniVision OV50C40 primary camera, 2MP Macro
• Front camera: 8MP OmniVision OV8856

The camera on this phone isn’t amazing, but it can produce decent still images. That’s mostly because it uses a well-understood primary sensor and has a good selection of special modes in the camera application.

One curiosity about this phone is that Android 14 has been compiled with 79 supported camera sensors, hinting that the choice of which 50MP sensor to use came late in the design process.

There are only two 50MP sensors on this supported list: the Samsung S5KJN1 and the OmniVision OV50C40, and it turns out to be the latter.

This is a modern 1/1.3″ Color 50-megapixel (8192 x 6144) CMOS Image Sensor with PureCel Plus Technology, designed for High Dynamic Range (HDR) captures.

According to the OmniVision specifications for this chip, it can produce 8K at 30 fps video, but Doogee decided that the maximum capture resolution is only 1080p at 30 fps.

This choice might have more to do with the ability of the T606 to assemble the frames quickly enough, but given the functionality of the OV50C40, it’s a disappointing outcome for those who like video.

In short, the primary camera can take good-quality still images, but the video capability was all but ignored. A 2MP macro sensor also needs plenty of light to avoid generating predictably grainy output.

OmniVision also makes the FaceTime camera, the OV8856, which has an 8MP sensor and a 78°FOV. It does enough for that job, but it isn’t anything special.

The Doogee Fire 6 Power is typical of modern Chinese-made phones. The designers throw in a good-quality sensor but don’t spend the time to have the camera application exploit its capabilities.

While it is acceptable for group scenes and majestic panoramics, the video capture is not good enough for a phone in this price range.

Doogee Fire 6 Power Camera samples

• Camera score: 3/5

Doogee Fire 6 Power: performance

• Lacklustre SoC
• Great battery life

Other than comparing this phone to others that use the T606, like the Doogee Fire 6 and AGM H Max, it isn’t easy to find modern devices that operate at a level this low.

In this instance, I chose to compare it to the Ulefone Armor Mini 20 Pro, a physically much smaller device but also one that uses an entry-level SoC and is priced similarly.

But, even the modest MediaTek Dimensity 6300 is too strong an SoC to make this a close comparison with the T606.

Since 2019, ARM SoC technology has moved on significantly, and the T606, or whatever Unison likes to call it these days, isn’t ideal for any job that’s remotely taxing. Graphics performance is particularly poor, making it only suitable for basic 2D games.

While the IPS panel on this phone is of reasonable quality and the colours are well saturated, it has a curious resolution of only 720 x 1612, i.e. less than the 1080p of the video capture.

I don’t know if this screen influenced the choice of video capture resolution, but it was a poor choice in any case.

There is one chink of light in the gloom of this phone’s performance, and that’s the battery lifespan. Given the size of the battery and the low-end performance of the T606, that it would last a long time was to be expected.

At a whopping 31 hours and 18 minutes, that’s edging into a fifth day of use, from my perspective, and with curation, this phone could easily last a week or more.

My only concern is that if Doogee had given the Fire 6 Power a more modern SoC, perhaps one with better power management, how much longer would it have operated with the same battery? I suspect another four or five hours, at least.

The data from the Ulefone Armor Mini 20 Pro supports this viewpoint, as it has less than half the battery capacity but manages almost two-thirds of the run time. Admittedly, it has a smaller screen, needing less power to run, but the power efficiency of the Dimensity 6300 is undeniable.

Battery life is good, but it might have been even better.

• Performance score: 3/5

Doogee Fire 6 Power: Final verdict

The entire thrust of this device appears to be a power distribution system for other phones, and at the maker’s prices, it’s an expensive device to use purely as a power bank.

For this reviewer, that argument doesn’t fly. Doogee is asking $300 for a phone whose only real strength is battery capacity since it has a slow processor and the camera’s video capabilities have been butchered.

The biggest issue here is the T606. Given the occasional stuttering of the interface, this strongly hints that the T606 isn’t strong enough for an Android 14 device. It might have met the cost criteria that Doogee set for this series, but it condemned the Fire 6 Power in numerous other ways.

It’s not the best phone Doogee has made, so I should prepare myself psychologically for my upcoming review of the base Fire 6 model, which has this design but potentially even less technology.

Should I buy a Doogee Fire 6 Power?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

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