No one escapes that Wolder is one of those companies that knows perfectly how to adapt to the market situation at all times. Reflecting this is its founder and president, Ricardo Garrudo, who started as a trailer distributor more than two decades ago to become the visible head of one of the leading Spanish companies in the technology market.
Wolder is a 100% Spanish group with more than 25 years of experience headquartered in Barros (Cantabria), although it has assembly plants in China. Over the last few years it has managed to position itself with products of very good value for money, especially in the tablet segment, but now they want to go one step further.
This new challenge actually begins at the end of 2013, when the company launches its first mobiles. In this time it has tried to seduce the user with very affordable products, but now that can change as we will see in this analysis of the Wolder Wiam #65, sold by the Cantabrian company as the best smartphone designed in Spain.
We are talking about a terminal with high specifications that boasts design and camera to claim Spanish technology. This new flagship of Wolder is positioned within the premium mid-range, a booming segment aimed at all those looking for a powerful smartphone but not willing to spend a fortune, will this Wiam #65 be good enough to seduce the public?
Very good quality finishes
We begin the analysis of the Wiam #65 talking about its design, one of the true strengths of this 5.5-inch terminal that is neither excessively large nor very heavy. At first glance it is quite reminiscent of the iPhone 6 with which, in fact, several people have confused it during the trial time we have had to perform this review of the Wolder Wiam #65.
It is a unibody smartphone with aluminum body, although not entirely since we have two small pieces of plastic at the ends of the back. Despite this it is very elegant and pleasant to the touch, with rounded lines that positively affect its ergonomics.
The DragonTrail glass-protected display dominates the front. Above the panel we have the main speaker and the front camera for selfies while at the bottom we have the button – not backlit – start, which is something questionable and the rest of the buttons are not capacitive but virtual, a configuration that takes a couple of days to get used to.
At this bottom of the front we also find a fairly particular notification LED, christened Quasar Light. When you receive a notification the lower end of the terminal lights up slightly with this system as if it were a cylon, which will surely catch the attention of your friends.
You won’t be able to configure the lights as on some high-end terminals but the system already automatically identifies what type of notification is to show red, green or blue depending on the occasion.
The side frames have good metallic finishes. The left is practically bare, since we only find the removable tray to insert a SIM card and a microSD or, if you prefer, two SIM cards.
On the right side we find three buttons with metallic finish, two of them to control the volume and the third that acts as the off/lock button of the terminal.
In the upper frame we have the jack for the headphones and at the bottom the main microphone, the microUSB connector and the main speaker.
In order to avoid confusion, the name of the terminal appears on the back next to the Wolder logo, although what stands out most is the fingerprint reader – which does not make the button times – located just below the LED flash and the main camera, which stands out remarkably and is located in a very focused position.
The dimensions of the Wolder Wiam #65 draw us a fairly compact terminal to be a smartphone with a 5.5-inch screen. It is also surprising for its metallic finish and ergonomics, so we are undoubtedly facing one of the strengths of this device.
A screen to show off
The Wolder Wiam #65’s display stretches to 5.5 inches on an IPS panel with One Glass Solution technology to reduce its thickness and 2.5D glass.
It has Full HD resolution (1,920 x 1,080p) with an average density of about 400 pixels per inch, a figure that has nothing to envy of its direct competitors within the most demanding midrange.
As soon as you turn on the terminal we will realize that it is a rather striking screen, with marked colors that some will find some will find some somewhat saturated but that can be easily configured through the Miravision controls in the settings menu.
What doesn’t convince us are the side frames that surround the screen, something that becomes a more obvious problem on devices with large screens since the dimensions increase above the desirable.
The brightness level is reasonable, both indoors and outdoors, while viewing angles are quite wide. In short, it is a good screen to consume multimedia contents or enjoy video games with advanced graphics.
Remarkable performance, but with nuances
The Wiam #65 comes from the powerful MediaTek Helio P10 processor, an eight cores that we also find inside the Elephone P9000 or the UMI Super.
In general we have a remarkable performance, something that is certainly enhanced because – as we will see in the next section – the customization layer implemented by Wolder is minimal.
Wolder Wiam’s performance tests and benchmarks #65 put the terminal below some of its most direct competitors. However, in practice this smartphone is very fluid in almost all scenarios, even when it comes to moving heavy applications or managing multitasking.
However, we will notice somewhat longer loading times in really demanding video games, some other punctual problem that is fixed through software as we will see later and, above all, we will notice that the mobile suffers from overheating if we put all the meat on the grill.
As we will see later the processing of the photographs is quite slow: if we shoot instead of RAW we will have to wait a few extra seconds, which becomes a problem also when trying to lower the battery, which ends up lowering the note of the terminal in this section.
What we have no complaint about is the fingerprint reader, located on the back of the phone. In our analysis of the Wolder Wiam #65 we have been able to verify that it behaves correctly, being fast and accurate in most situations, in line with its price.
A very clean Android
The Worlder Wiam #65 lands from Android 6.0 Marshmallow and does so with a version with virtually no bloatware, which is certainly a very positive point to buy this terminal instead of opting for other Asian brands that flood the smartphone with pre-installed apps.
What can be a problem for many is that mix between the virtual button on the screen and the touch home button, something that it costs to get used to some days. Fortunately we can configure the virtual buttons and even make them disappear by default from the screen to gain more space when it comes to playing multimedia contents.
Among the little «strange» that we find in the Android version stands out Big Button, an application that allows us to access different promotions and offers that the brand understands can trigger the functionality of our smartphone. Best of all, it barely interferes with the normal use of the device, so it is up to the user to take advantage of it or not.
Finally we have as standard 32 GB of internal storage of which are free about 24 GB, which in any case can be expanded through a microSD card.