Okay, to be fair, the Cherry Mobile Flare doesn’t exactly look bad. In fact, it looks like it costs more than the Php3,999 that I paid for it (after standing in line for 4 hours). A CD-R King saleslady even mistook it for one of the small new Xperia phones when I was out looking for a cheap micro SD card for my Flare. However, there’s nothing unique or inspiring about it. It’s literally just a black slab of plastic with a screen that dominates the front of the device. Below that gorgeous IPS display are 4 capacitive buttons: home, menu, back and search. Above the screen is the speaker grill when receiving calls, the 1.3mp front-facing camera, and the proximity and light sensors.
Running along the left side of the Cherry Mobile Flare, you’ll find the volume rocker toward the top and the micro-USB port near the bottom. The right side of the phone is absolutely devoid of any hardware controls and other details, save for a small notch on the back cover to help you pry it open when you want to get to the battery, SIM cards or microSD. At the top and on the lefthand side is the 3.5mm headphone jack while to the right is the power/lock button. On the bottom, you’ll find the microphone pinhole for voice calls or recording audio. The 5mp camera and LED flash can be found at the back, along with tiny Flare branding in the middle and the Cherry Mobile branding closer to the bottom where the loudspeaker grill is at. source : noypigeeks.com
The Screen: Gorgeous 4 Inches of IPS
The 4 inch IPS display of the Cherry Mobile Flare is one of its obvious key selling points, and it has a resolution of 480 x 800 (WVGA). That equates to a pixel density of 233ppi, which is really sharp when compared to other phones that you can get at similar price points. For example, the Galaxy Y has a pixel density of 133ppi while the Optimus L3 has an even crappier 125ppi. Color reproduction is also quite remarkable, and it really showed when I used on of my favorite multicolor wallpapers on the lockscreen. It’s really nice to wake up the device and be treated to colors as rich and vibrant as the Flare is capable of. Viewing angles are also great, but not especially so. While most budget smartphones out there come with cramped 3-3.5 inch low resolution screens, the Flare is an absolute steal with its larger, sharper and more vibrant IPS display. A larger screen means better enjoyment when watching movies, playing games, and reading articles on the web, simply because of how much more detail the screen is capable of.
However there is a downside to the Flare’s screen. It’s only a two-point touch, multi-touchscreen, meaning it can only recognize two simultaneous screen presses at any given time. Two-point touchscreens on most smartphones are a bit flawed because they have a hard time recognizing simultaneous key presses that are spaced close together. So it will sometimes recognize key presses from two different fingers as just a single key press. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if it were just about navigating through the UI, but there are other areas of the phone’s usability that this affects, which we’ll get to a bit later.
The Chipset: Dual Core on a Budget
Another key selling point of the Cherry Mobile Flare is that it comes with a 1.2 GHz dual core Qualcomm MSM7627A CPU coupled with an Adreno 203 GPU. Not only does the Flare have a gorgeous display, it’s also quite fast and zippy. In fact, when I was first standing in line to buy the Flare, I knew what the specs were but still had some tempered expectations. Needless to say, I was quite impressed by how responsive the Cherry Mobile Flare was when navigating the UI or running various games and apps.
“Not only does the Flare have a gorgeous display, it’s also quite fast and zippy.”
Of course, user experience can be rather subjective. What about hard numbers? I ran the Flare on 3 popular benchmarking apps. Quadrant and AnTuTu are popular benchmarking apps that measure CPU, I/O and graphics performance, while KFS Benchmark is a graphics benchmarking tool that measures framerates through 3 different OpenGL 2.0 tests that stress vertex throughput, fill rate, and draw calls.
I scored a 2,929 on Quadrant, which is better than what Galaxy Nexus and Atrix 4G users scored. I also ran it through AnTuTu v3.0.1, although this time I got 6,319, which is slightly worse compared to the Galaxy Nexus. Finally, I ran it through KFS, where it averaged 25.393 FPS (frame rates per second). When it came to the KFS tests, the Flare performed quite well in the fill rate test, topping out at 32.965 FPS while the vertex throughput and draw calls were stuck at 22.793 and 22.761 respectively.
These are very respectable numbers that show that the Cherry Mobile Flare is able to perform on par with a phone like the Galaxy Nexus. To put things in perspective, The Galaxy Nexus still sells for a little more than Php15k in the gray markets. You’re getting almost that same level of performance for just Php3,999. Cool, huh?
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