There's a new quad-core smartphone in town: the Cherry Mobile Omega Icon. And unlike the company's previous offerings, it flaunts a metallic trim and a premium-looking, leather-finish back, complete with faux stitching, reminiscent of the Samsung Galaxy Note 3's rear, although that's where the similarity ends. According to the Cherry Mobile Facebook page, the Icon is already available in stores for P6,499. Besides the curious choice of back cover material, the other thing that stands out about the Icon is the brains behind it: It's the first locally branded phone we've come across that's designed around the latest 28nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 architecture, which combines four Cortex-A7 cores with Adreno 302 graphics and 1GB of RAM. In principle, the 28nm processor should result in performance gains and reduced power usage compared to 45nm processors that share the same number of cores. Of course, with regard to synthetic and real-life tests, we still don't know if the Icon will blow other smartphones running on older Snapdragon MSM8225Q chipsets out of the water, but there's a good chance it will. Let's see. Other specs include a 5-inch 720p IPS display fronted by a scratch-resistant Dragontrail glass; 4GB of expandable storage; Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS; and Android Jelly Bean 4.3. There are two cameras on the device: a 13-megapixel sensor on the back and a 5-megapixel sensor on the front. Both are assisted by LED flash. The second quarter of 2014 is shaping up to be huge for budget handsets, and by the looks of it, the Cherry Mobile Omega Icon is well worth checking out, if only for its distinctive, leather-inspired appearance and quad-core internals. Specs of the Cherry Mobile Omega Icon (Price: P6,499): 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8212 chipset Adreno 320 GPU 1GB RAM 4GB internal storage microSD card slot (up to 32GB) 5-inch 720p IPS display with Dragontrail glass (720 x 1,280 resolution) 13-megapixel rear camera with LED flash 5-megapixel front camera with LED flash Android Jelly Bean 4.3

Last edited by BAMPIRA (2014-05-21 22:40:24)