Cherry Mobile One Review

Philippines has recently joined the countries where there will be Android One and one of the two Android device that’s available in the Philippines is the Cherry Mobile One. So what’s up with the Android One devices? Well, these smartphones hardware and software are controlled by Google that why they always get the latest Android updates for up to two years.

Hardware

The design of the Cherry Mobile One is very simple. At the front, you’ll notice that there’s only a display and there’s no capacitive buttons. It’s simple but it’s clean however the bezels should’ve been lessen below the display since there are no capacitive buttons.

At the right side of the phone, you’ll see the power button and the volume button but sometimes I mistakenly recognize the volume button as the power button because of the positioning of the buttons. One thing that I like about the Cherry Mobile One is that the smartphone is light and it feels good even using it in one hand thanks to the small 4.5-inch display.

The body of the smartphone is made up of plastic but it feels sturdy and very comfortable to hold.  Inside, you could insert two micro-sim and a MicroSD card because most of you might need more memory from that built-in 8GB storage. But hey, at least Cherry Mobile didn’t fit a 4GB internal memory inside it. One thing that you might miss in this smartphone is the transfer of apps to SD card but don’t worry. According to Cherry Mobile, they’ll have an update for the Cherry Mobile One regarding that issue

Unfortunately, Cherry Mobile One doesn’t have an LTE modem inside it. That’s why you can only rely on HSPA+ which isn’t that bad. Unfortunately, using which sim card to use for texting, calling and for surfing are pretty confusing. I think Google should really fix that on their Android smartphones because all Android One smartphones are dual-sim.

Display

One of the things that you might not like in the Cherry Mobile One is the resolution of its display. The Cherry Mobile One got a 4.5-inch FWVGA 854×480 display. Today, most smartphones are already at HD especially at its price range.  But don’t get fooled with that because the colors and the outdoor visibility of the display was good.

Software

The software inside the Cherry Mobile One is probably is its best feature and main selling point. The Cherry Mobile One is an Android One device that’s why the Cherry Mobile One is already powered by the latest Android 5.1 Lollipop and yes,  the experience is as smooth as the nexus however, Google apps are already pre-installed in the smartphone which takes up a little bit of your storage.

But don’t worry, these Google apps that are pre-installed in the Cherry Mobile One are pretty good and they are actually useful like Google Keep, which is a notetaking app. One thing you’ll notice after using these Google apps is that Google wants you to get attached with its ecosystem. What do I mean by that? These apps work pretty well on Android and when you want to replace your Android phone with a new one, syncing files and everything in these Google apps is a breeze.

Despite having only a quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM, the Cherry Mobile One is fast and everything is silky smooth I barely experienced any lags or slowdowns on the smartphone that’s why I love using this smartphone for texting because it’s fast and very responsive.

The Cherry Mobile One might only have a Quad-Core MediaTek MT6582 processor and a 1GB of RAM but it exceeded my expectations when It comes to performance. I notice the Cherry Mobile One performed well and better than other smartphones with the same specifications. I tried Asphalt 8 and as expected, it was playable but what I did not expect is that it would smoother than other smartphones. Other games fared pretty well too. I got an Antutu score of  19366 which isn’t that bad.

Camera

The camera of the Cherry Mobile One isn’t its biggest feature. The Cherry Mobile One packs a 5-Megapixel Rear camera with LED flash and the images that I took are mostly soft and noise are noticeable despite having a decent lighting conditions but I think a simple software update could fix that.

Verdict

The Cherry Mobile One isn’t the best smartphone at t P3,999 when you look at its hardware specifications but the experience on using an Android One device is amazing. The hardware isn’t the most powerful in its price range but the performance and the smoothness of this Android One smartphone is comparable to the Nexus device. If you want to have a smartphone with iPhone-like speeds and you want to have an amazing Android experience, then maybe, you might want to check out the Cherry Mobile One.

The Cherry Mobile One is now available nationwide for P3,999.