Here are our first impressions about the Cherry Mobile Flare Infinity.
In the recent FlareUption event, local mobile electronics giant Cherry Mobile unleashed a total of six new smartphones under the popular Flare series banner. The CM Flare Infinity is the flagship, carrying the brand towards new heights in an attempt to further solidify the hold in the local smartphone market.
The Cherry Mobile Flare Infinity features an edge-to-edge display, defying the norm of putting a bezel on the sides. At first, it looks like an inconvenience, but it’s surprisingly well thought out. Unlike the Galaxy S6 Edge’s screen, it just curves slightly on the edges, leaving no chance of accidental clicks. The screen is a joy to look at and the LTPS is actually pretty good. Visibility in direct sunlight is also great, as it gets considerably bright outdoors.
While I personally liked the overall design of the Cherry Mobile Flare Infinity, I’m not much of a fan of the back. Having an aluminum unibody build is great and it seems to be really sturdy, but the white antenna lines are a bit ugly. This design cue was taken from the iPhone, and it would probably be better of if they stick with the same grayish color instead. It’s not as bad as saying this is a turn-off, but they could’ve done better.
Not wanting to follow industry standards, Cherry Mobile placed the fingerprint on the side. It lines up together with traditional power and volume buttons. Based on my initial testing, it’s very fast in recognizing my fingerprint. For people who typically holds a handset using the right hand, it’s convenient. However, it’s a little difficult to use when using the left hand to hold the phone. Also, with the sheer size of the Cherry Mobile Flare Infinity, people with small hands would have troubles in reaching it out. But that can just be a case of familiarity, so we’ll follow-up on this on our review.
Among the things I tried was the speaker. It performs very well and it can be considerably loud when watching a YouTube video. Often times, I just set it to just above the middle of the volume slider because it’s enough when watching by myself. The Cherry Mobile Flare Infinity also comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack cover that doubles as a SIM card tray ejector.
Having 4GB of RAM, Cherry Mobile Flare Infinity handles multitasking like a champ. There’s a slight downgrade in the processor department compared to the Cherry Mobile M1, but the MediaTek Helio P10 octa-core processor is no slouch either. As per my initial testing, there’s no visibly lag and stutters while using the device. Since most Android phones run great when they’re new, we’ll see how this phone performs after some time to get a good gauge of how good it actually is. And for the geeks out there, here’s the score we got when we run the AnTuTu benchmark app.
I’m not sure if it’s just me, but the cameras aren’t that impressive. First, it ships with the dated camera app, which I recommend to quickly replace with the Google Camera from the Play Store. When taking photos, sometimes there’s a small shutter delay that’s quite inconsistent. The colors are a bit saturated for my liking as well. But this is just based on my quick indoor tests, so there’s still a chance to convince me once I take it outside for camera samples.
The Cherry Mobile Flare Infinity is running Android 6.0 Marshmallow under the hood. Based on previous releases, there’s little chance that this will be updated to 7.0. But we’ll ask Cherry Mobile about that, as they also had their fair share of Android updates over the years. The software comes bloated with Cherry Mobile apps. Fortunately, most of them can be disabled and uninstalled straight from the app settings page.
Battery performance isn’t extraordinary at all. In fact, it drains a few percentages of battery even on standby mode. Checking the battery settings page reveals that the bloatware apps take a lot of juice, so we’ll be disabling and uninstalling all of them to reveal the Flare Infinity’s full potential. It also supports fast charging and USB Type-C.
UPDATE: Check out our full written and video review of the Cherry Mobile Flare Infinity!
Cherry Mobile Flare Infinity is priced at Php12,999, which is quite steep considering it’s from a local brand. Those who are looking to buy this a device in this price range would probably think twice in shelling out that kind of money. But we’d like to reserve judgment until we’re finished with our review.
We’ll be using the Cherry Mobile Flare Infinity as our daily driver for the next couple of days to find out more about it. If you have any specific things that you’d like to know about, hit us up in the comments below and we’ll gladly include them in our full Cherry Mobile Flare Infinity review.