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Cherry Mobile Flare Selfie Review

January 7, 2016January 7, 2016 Daniel Morial Leave a comment

While a lot of flagship devices have quality front cameras, budget devices are left behind with low megapixel shooters, but not the Cherry Mobile Flare Selfie. With its 16-megapixel front camera, it’s bound to give great selfies. It also has a fingerprint sensor, which is rare in this segment.

With its impressive megapixel count, can the Flare Selfie live up to its name and also as your everyday smartphone? Read on through the review to find out.

Design and Construction

Like other new Flare smartphone from Cherry Mobile, the Flare Selfie is designed to be a premium on a budget. With its aluminum frame, holding the device on hand will give a lasting impression on its build. It’s solid and does feel like a more expensive phone. Although, the glossy back may not be as likable as the aluminum frame.

cm-flare-selfie-01

The front is familiar with the 5-inch display, earpiece, a couple of sensors, and the front-facing camera with a single LED flash.

cm-flare-selfie-15

The right side has the volume rocker and the power/lock button while the SIM card tray is on the left side.

cm-flare-selfie-16

On top is the 3.5mm headphone jack with the secondary microphone. The bottom end houses the micro-USB port, primary microphone, and the loudspeaker.

cm-flare-selfie-02

Flipping to the back will show the rear camera with its two-tone LED flash, the fingerprint scanner, and some branding labels.

I’ll give Cherry Mobile its deserved praise by giving the new Flare series aluminum construction. Having this gives the Flare Selfie a firm build with no creaks or whatsoever. It’s time to say goodbye to poorly built devices soon as we see more similar designs this year.

Continued in next page: Display and Multimedia / OS, Apps, and UI / Camera

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Cherry Mobile Flare 2X Quick Review

November 20, 2013November 20, 2013 Bob Freking Leave a comment

The Flare series from Cherry Mobile can be called one of the most affordable yet power-packed smartphones in the market right now. Succeeding the original Flare & the Flare 2.0, the CM Flare 2X comes improved with 1GB RAM & an 8MP camera on the back, but does it have what it takes to be a winner? Read on our quick review to find out.

CHERRY MOBILE FLARE 2X

After handling a plethora of massive smartphones, the Flare 2X feels small with its 4-inch display. Albeit the small size, it felt really comfortable and compact in the hands. While the rest of the phone feels solid, we can’t help but say that the plastic construction falls short compared to its predecessor’s matte finish material.

CHERRY MOBILE FLARE 2X

The 4-inch display on the Flare 2X works very well for a phone of this caliber. We can’t really expect much for the price, but we can say that colors are fairly saturated and that the pixels are not as distinguishable. Viewing angles won’t be so good as well if you view it from the top side.

CHERRY MOBILE FLARE 2X

Navigation through the UI & basic tasks were a breeze thanks to the quad-core CPU & the 1GB RAM. Don’t expect it to handle heavy tasks though as it starts to show slowdowns even at the thin beginning of multitasking. Benchmark scores can attest to that as well.

Antutu - 11,356
Quadrant – 3,781
NenaMark 2 – 41.6

CHERRY MOBILE FLARE 2X

The front facing snapper on the device is really good and it works so smoothly. On the other hand, the 8 megapixel sensor paired with an LED flash on the back will get the job done if you just want to capture photos; the thing is, your picture won’t be worth a thousand words. Maybe just a hundred noisy ones that won’t be heard in the dark.

CHERRY MOBILE FLARE 2X

The Flare 2X’s 1,550mAh will get you through a whole day of moderate usage, no doubt about it. It does a lot better in standby too, lasting up to a couple of days.

Cherry Mobile Flare 2X specs:
4? WVGA (480 x 800) 3-point touch screen LCD, 233ppi
1.2GHz Qualcomm 8225Q quad-core CPU
Adreno 203 GPU
1GB RAM
8 megapixel AF camera w/ LED flash
VGA front-facing
3G, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth
dual-SIM
4GB of internal storage
up to 32GB via microSD
1,550mAh battery
Android 4.1.2 Jellybean

CHERRY MOBILE FLARE 2X

Summary

If you’re truly stuck to a budget of Php4,499, then there really is no other choice. The Cherry Mobile Flare 2X gives a lot for the money and it’s really hard to complain on its shortcomings – the lack of power, bad viewing angles, the plastic build and the like – all of which are understandable compromises that had to be made. For the price, however, you’re getting a really well-balanced phone despite its flaws.

What we liked about it:

Affordable
Good speakers
Feels good to hold

What we didn’t like about it:

Cartoonish app icons
Plastic build
Bad viewing angle

The post Cherry Mobile Flare 2X Quick Review appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.

Cherry Mobile Flare to get Jellybean update on June 1

May 29, 2013May 29, 2013 Bob Freking Leave a comment

Dubbed as the “dual-core ng bayan”, the CM Flare is going to receive some Jellybean treatment on June 1. The update will only be done through their service centers nationwide since there is no OTA download just yet.

flare update

It is very likely that this will be Android 4.1 only, and not 4.2 as several Flares are running it already. It would be great if we had 4.2 however. After all, the new set of Cherry Mobile phones, the Flare 2.0 included, packs Android 4.2.

By the way, Cherry Mobile advises you to bring your warranty card and your official receipt; also, don’t forget to back up your data.

It’s not OTA, but we think it’s a step in the right direction that local brands are updating their earlier phones. If you receive the update any time soon, feel free to tell us what you think down below.

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Open source for the win

January 6, 2013January 6, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

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ON Christmas Eve, I cobbled together a network-attached storage (NAS) at home to enable everyone in our house to have a shared directory for school, work and personal files. This shared directory is also accessible from outside the house – like a rudimentary personal “cloud” for our family.

It wasn’t complicated — you can go to my blog for the article on the process — because the setup was a matter of connecting an old portable USB drive to a cheap CD-R King wireless router and setting things up using a visual interface.

The magic sauce in the setup is the Tomato firmware that runs on the router. Tomato is a Linux-based router firmware that allows you to manage your device on such things as filtering and setting quality of service rules for certain types of connections so that people browsing websites don’t experience crawling connection when someone downloads using a torrent.

HOME NAS SETUP. The CD-R King router CW-5356U runs the Tomato firmware that simplifies the setting up of a network-attached storage. (Photo by Max Limpag)

The Tomato firmware that comes with the CD-R King router that I use, a CW-5356U model, simplifies the setting up of a NAS by allowing you to plug a portable drive into the router’s USB port. You can set the system to auto-mount any drive that you plug into it and make it shareable in your network. You can also designate a password for your shared drive so that not everyone who connects to your Wi-Fi can access it.

The system also assists you in setting up an FTP (file transfer protocol) server that will allow you to access that drive outside of your network. You can, with the setup, access your home files from the office or even on the go.

Promise of open source

What’s even more fun is that you can view movies stored on your portable drive over your iPhone or iPad.

The router also has a facility that will allow you to connect a printer to its USB port to turn it into a network printer. It also allows you to set up complex rules that can, for example, bar your children from accessing Facebook during class days but allow you to continue using the social network.

For just P1,280, the wireless router trumps the features of branded and more expensive models.

I think the CD-R King router illustrates the promise of open source software.

Tomato firmware is open source, meaning it is released under a license that encourages sharing the software and collaborating to make it better. Any wireless router manufacturer can use the Tomato firmware for its product. By using Tomato, the manufacturer no longer has to spend to develop and maintain its own firmware. Instead, it can just concentrate on the manufacturing side of the business.

By using Tomato, CD-R King is able to manufacture a router that’s really top-class for such a low price.

But if there’s an open source project that’s really making such a huge impact, it’s Android. There are phones in the market today that are powerful and advanced and yet cost less than P10,000. Cherry Mobile’s Flare, for example, costs just P3,999 but comes with formidable specs: Android ICS, 1.2 Ghz dual-core processor, five-megapixel camera and dual-SIM capability. It was such a hot item during the holidays that stocks were wiped out.

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