Cherry Mobile has been dominating the lower end of the market, but now they are climbing up the ladder with a powerful midranger in the form of the Cherry Mobile Flare S7 Plus. Boasting high-quality specs and a sleek exterior, the Flare S7 Plus is definitely a step up for the brand. After taking it for a quick spin, here are our thoughts on this phone.
What’s in the box?
You really get the most out of your money with Cherry Mobile. The Flare S7 Plus’ packaging includes a charger, a USB Type-C cord for charging, earphones, a clear bumper case, and a Type-C adaptor for the earphones.
Design & Construction
The Flare S7 series itself is hardly recognizable as a Cherry phone. Encased in a slim body, the back panel houses a dual main camera and a fingerprint sensor. At the bottom are the loudspeakers and a USB Type-C charging port. On the left is the sim card tray, and at the right are the power and volume control buttons. The phone is pretty heavy at 200g, but it has a great balance to it and doesn’t feel cheap at all.
The only downside is the smoothness of its exterior that can cause it to slip easily from your grip so you might really need to use the bumper case included.
Display & Multimedia
Its 6.18” TrueView display produces rich colors and has great clarity. Text and images appear sharp as it has a 2246 x 1080 px screen resolution. Even at 100% brightness, the display doesn’t cause eyestrain
As for sound, turning up the volume at max might not be a good idea as the sound quality suffers. However, the speakers can really play loudly and can be heard across a busy room.
Camera
For a phone of this price range, it was very impressive that the Flare S7 Plus was able to fit two dual cameras. The main shooter consists of a 16MP and a 5MP lens, while the selfie camera has 16MP and IR lenses. Both can capture amazing and detailed images regardless of the lighting. As for shooting in low-light conditions, there’s a visible noise in the photos but the overall quality is still great.
The local app has a lot of features and various shooting modes to play with. I find it really cool that when you’re using the Professional mode for the first time, there’s a prompt explaining the basics of photography and what the manual settings are for.
There’s also the Flaremoji, which is absolutely entertaining but still has a lot of room for improvement. You can record videos as the different characters available in the camera app. While testing this feature, I noticed that it had delays in AR tracking and the characters itself can only copy a limited number of facial expressions.
Cherry Mobile Flare S7 Plus Sample Camera Photos:
Performance
Powered by a Helio P60 chipset coupled by a Mali-G72 MP3 GPU, the Flare S7 Plus can be considered a budget gaming phone. It can run games with heavy graphics requirements smoothly, and the 4GB RAM allows you to multitask without the fear of lagging. It also has a 64GB internal storage that can be expanded to 256GB via a microSD. I played a few rounds of Identity V set at the highest graphics settings and didn’t encounter any issues. Even with Mortal Kombat X, game assets loaded fairly quickly. Other features are also surprisingly reliable: both the fingerprint and face sensor work really well compared to other phones at the same price range.
The 3,050 mAh battery can last a whole day depending on usage–heavy gaming can cut this time shorter. But despite this, it doesn’t heat up as fast as other phones with higher processors. The S7 Plus runs on an Android 8.1 Oreo OS, allowing you to play the latest games on the market.
Overall, the Cherry Mobile Flare S7 Plus is truly remarkable on several fronts: from the expensive-looking exterior to its impressive cameras and top-notch performance, this is a phone worth coveting. The Flare S7 Plus retails for Php 11,999.