Cherry Mobile Flare S5 Review - Hungry Geeks

One of the six units announced by local mobile phone brand, Cherry Mobile during their Flare series launching. Priced at 5,699Php, the Cherry Mobile Flare S5 is standing just a couple hundred Peso above the CM’s Flare 5. The difference? A fingerprint sensor, IPS vs Amoled screen, and a more premium Samsung-ish build, and USB Type C port.

Design and Construction

First of all, at 5,699Php; this phone’s design is gorgeous. We have to say that this is really an upgrade from what we usually see from Cherry Mobile. The phone still has that plastic body, but the frame is made of metal aluminum material. This gives the phone a premium tone, a heavier feel, and better quality. However, the screen was not fully utilized with thick-thick bezels surrounding the screen; fortunately, it is backed up by a 5″ HD IPS screen which gives users a great viewing angle.

The front face of the phone resembles a Samsung Note phone with an oblong shaped home button, it comes with a non-lit navigation button below, the earpiece and a nice 8MP front camera on top. The 3.5mm audio jack and single antenna band is found on top, volume rocker and power button on the right-hand side, and dual speaker grills on the bottom part. At the back part, is the 16MP primary camera with dual LED flash, and the Cherry Mobile logo. We just have to say that the glossy, brushed-aluminum, plastic finish back cover does not really look good with the rest of the phone. While a removable 2,400mAh battery is found, 2 micro SIM slots and the micro SD card tray is found under this back cover.

Over-all, the whole design is fair with the exemption of the thick bezel and the flimsy back cover, the construction is somehow flawed as the physical home button has that clicking sound and gets stuck often times when pressed.

Handling and grip seems good, the curve back cover feels natural on the hands, weight seems fine, and the aluminum metal frame just feels right on the fingers.

Display and Multimedia

To start off, we feel that the screen is a bit small for our liking. Maybe it’s those pesky bezels surrounding the screen. Colors are bright and colors are clean. the IPS HD screen really helped a lot on this handset. On the audio side, we feel it really lacks a lot of bass, and volume, to tell you the truth, I would not use it the on-board speakers and would rather purchase a decent headset or a wireless Bluetooth speaker.

Camera

Packing a 16MP primary camera, the Cherry Mobile Flare S5 provides decent camera quality. It does not fair well on low-light environment, but it can take decent clear photographs. Colors are a bit over saturated, and environment tends to be a bit blue-ish that we would like it to be.

The 8MP front camera is decent as well. Again, the colors are a bit over saturated. Even at a well-lit surroundings, it does not look very natural. For guys who are looking for a nice camera phone; the Flare S5 should be consideration but placed at the bottom of the stack of choices.

Sample Photos

Usage and Applications

We had a blast looking through the Cherry Mobile Flare S5. Unlike other Cherry Mobile released at the same bracket before this, the Flare S5 is fast and responsive. It manages to be decent in terms of not lagging even if there are numerous apps that are opened, and is capable of running casual games that we usually play with no issues. We were also surprise that the on-board keyboard is very responsive and accurate even with big hands.

The fingerprint sensor is accurate and fast to recognize and is located at on the home button; which feels a bit awkward. If you are coming from a phone with a finger sensor on the same position, and it should be fine. A few more features from this phone, is the availablability of an on-board Bonus Load app for Cherry Prepaid SIM users, the Cherry Fun Club which includes loads of content for such as games, promos, jokes, and news. They also have the on-board MovieClub which works like Netflix but has loads of current and classic Filipino movies.

Movie Club Turbo Download HotKnot

Apart from the bundled application, the Cherry Mobile Flare S5 has a few more features that we can check out. They have this thing called Turbo download on their settings menu, which lets your download large files of over 20MB faster using Wi-Fi or 4G/3G networks at the same time. They also have HotKnot which allows data exchange when the screen touches another device.

Smart Wake

Lastly, the Flare S5 has the Smart Wake feature which allows you to customize the way you handle your phone. This way you can double click to way screen, draw up to unlock, draw down to pause music, draw a C to open the camera, draw an E to open up Chrome and many more actions for a more efficient usage of your phone.

Battery

Packing a 2,400mAh removable battery, for our normal usage of checking emails, doing a few calls and SMS messages, checking our social media accounts, with our data turned on while on the road, and WiFi turned on when available, we managed to squeeze-in around 5 hours of usage.

Specifications:

Android Marshmallow 6.0
5″ HD IPS Screen
1280×720 resolution
Mediatek 6753
1.3GHz Octa-Core
Mali T720
3GB RAM
16GB Micro SD up to 64GB
GSP/GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA, LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0
Dual Micro SIM
16MP Rear Camera, 8MP Front Camera
USB Type C
3.5mm Audio Jack
2400mAh removable battery

Conclusion

We like this phone. At Php 5,699, you get to use a flagship looking phone, with a fingerprint sensor and USB Type C connector, while getting an Octa-Core processor and Dual-SIM support. We didnt like the camera, and the click-y home button, but we feel that the added functionality of features like the Smart Wake, and the rest of the Cherry Mobile exclusive applications more than makes up for it.