Another yet affordable smartphone from Cherry Mobile is now ready to take your money. The Cherry Mobile Flash has a price tag of only P5,999. It has a decent specs and looks that will wow you.
This guy was announced during the first week of July and we were lucky to get a commercial unit immediately in the second week.
Should you want to get this guy after the review, it is available in color white and gold.
Stay tuned as we share to you our Cherry Mobile Flash Review.
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What’s inside the box
If you are a reader of this blog or a constant visitor of our YouTube Channel, you are probably familiar with this section where we present the items inside the packaging of a Cherry Mobile smartphone.
You get a pretty much Cherry Mobile standard inside the box. Micro USB 2.0 cable, earphone, and wall charger are all colored white. A user manual is also included plus the SIM ejector tool.
For you to get a glimpse of this device, we invite you to watch our unboxing video below.
Cherry Mobile Flash Unboxing
Design and build
Let us get straight to the point. Cherry Mobile Flash is one of the best Cherry Mobile smartphones as of today. It has plastic unibody design but they used high-quality materials on this one.
You get a curved side and the back is slightly curved towards the edge. The placement of the buttons is ergonomically placed with the power button located below the volume control. It is very comfortable to reach these two important buttons on the right side of the device.
The front fo the Cherry Mobile Flash gets the 5.5-inch Full HD display and on top, you will find the loud speaker which is flanked by the proximity sensor and the 8MP fixed focus camera.
Flip it and you will be greeted by the textured material that looks premium even if it is made of plastic. You also get a fingerprint sensor on the upper middle part. And on the left side is the 16MP shooter with Auto Focus feature and paired with a single LED flash. You will also notice a noise-cancelling mic near the camera.
On top, you will find the 3.5mm audio port having a good time by itself.
At the bottom is rather old micro USB 2.0 port and another mic.
Display and UI
You get a full HD (1080 x 1920) screen resolution out of this device. Its display is crisp and I did not encounter viewing angle issues. If you are critical about black space between the display and the bezel, you can be bothered with a space on both sides. There is a few millimeter of black space there which could have been maximized.
This device uses a stock Android with a little tweak implemented specifically on the launcher. You still see those unwanted apps, but you have to live with it. The brand also needs to promote their home-grown apps.
Instead of using on-screen buttons, Cherry Mobile Flash employed capacitive buttons. To make a little distinction, the home button is red-outlined.
But still, you don’t get a backlighted buttons giving you the challenge to use in a dark environment.
Storage and Android 6.0
This is where the storage works hand in hand with the OS. The Cherry Mobile Flash has only 16G internal storage, which is pretty much standard on this brand.
But with “Adaptive Storage” on Android 6.0, your additional external microSD can be “merged” into the internal storage and be treated as one.
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What we haven’t tried is if the microSD gets damaged, what happened to the files in the “adaptive” mode. We have yet to find out.
On hybrid SIM card tray
It is pretty much expected to get a hybrid SIM tray on a budget smartphone. And when say hybrid, we mean you can not maximize the dual SIM feature of the phone. That is because you are left with two choices. One is to carry on with the 16G limited internal storage and enjoy using two SIM cards. Second is you enjoy additional storage through the use of hybrid tray and use one SIM card only. Your choice.
Fingerprint sensor
You can store maximum of five (5) fingerprints. Aside from the standard feature of the fingerprint sensor which is to unlock the phone, you can also use it to authorize purchases and app access.
Enrolling your fingerprint requires a little effort and the same is also observed when using it to unlock the phone.
Out of 10 unlocking attempts with the fingerprint sensor, we get a high score of 7. Three of them are unsuccessful, but it works.
Camera
So, is the 16MP worth using? Does it make beautiful images for your OOTD or daily Instagram posts? Let’s present to you few of the photos captured by this phone. These images are raw and resized only to fit on this website.
The pixel size of every photo using the automatic settings is 4608 × 3456 and an average size of the file is 2.3 MB.
Performance
The Cherry Mobile Flash is powered by a MTK6753 64-bit 1.3Ghz CPU and is paired with 2G of RAM. GPU is a Mali-T720. With these specs under the hood, you get a fair performance. You can’t expect too much. Loading of apps are smooth but it gets slower during multi-tasking.
Antutu benchmark gave Cherry Mobile Flash a score of 35,499. If this number is important to you, this device sits below Meizu M3/Note 3 having 43,629.
The Cherry Mobile Flash has a 5-point multi-touch.
Cherry Mobile Flash specs
5.5-inch full HD display, 1920 x 1080 resolution
1.3GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6753 processor
2GB of RAM
16GB internal storage
micro SD support up to 32G
16-megapixel rear camera with LED flash
8-megapixel front camera
Dual SIM, Hybrid
3G, LTE
WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, A-GPS, Fingerprint scanner
2800mAh battery
Android 6.0 Marshmallow
Conclusion
If your budget is tight and you only have P6,000 to spend then I can recommend to you Cherry Mobile Flash. It has a pretty decent specs, but like we said, do not expect too much. The physical look is a winner. It is the most beautiful Cherry Mobile device as of today. The camera, specially the rear camera takes beautiful photos but you have to be patient and a steady hand is required.
My only wish is for Cherry Mobile to make another version with a pumped up specs. I want to see a 3G RAM there and a 32G storage while maintaining a low price point.
