I think it's amazing how much value you can get nowadays, thanks to Philippine mobile phone brands. I'm thinking in particular about the Cherry Mobile Amber.
This mobile phone costs just P2,999. For that very reasonable amount of cash, you get a phone with the following specs:
-- A 4 inch screen
-- 4 GB of internal storage
-- 512 MB of RAM
-- A 1.2 GHz dual core CPU
-- Android 4.2 Jelly Bean on board
-- A memory card slot
-- HSPA+, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity
-- A GPS chip
-- A 1400 mAh battery
I got that information from this Lazada web page. What really jumps out at me is the price. I already thought that being able to buy a capable Android phone for P4,000 was pretty cool. But this is a full P1,000 less than that.
Now, a 4 inch screen might seem small, especially since there are so many affordable phones out there with much larger screens. It isn't uncommon to find budget-friendly phones with 4.5" or 5" screens, for example. But at this price, a 4 incher is just fine, I think. After all, I used a 3.5" Android for a long time, and while the screen size wasn't all that great, I could still do most of the things I wanted on that phone. Consider also that the iPhone had a 3.5" screen for a very long time, and many people were okay with that.
Unfortunately, the Lazada page didn't indicate what the resolution of the screen is. This is something that's important to know because a resolution of 800x480 on this sized screen would be fine, but one of 480x320 would be a downer. So I'll have to look for more information on that.
Just a few more comments first. 4 GB of internal storage sounds fairly okay, especially since the phone has a memory card slot for storing more media, if necessary. I wonder though how much of this space is available for installing apps. That was something that I always had to think about with an older phone. The storage for apps on that phone was so small that I couldn't install everything I wanted. I had to rely on an app like Link2SD to force more of each app's data to be located on the memory card. If I didn't do that, I wouldn't be able to install many of the apps I wanted. Even with Link2SD, I still had to think very carefully about whether I should install one app, or uninstall another. It felt very constricting.
The 512 MB of RAM is rather small unfortunately. There is some hope, because Android 4.4 (KitKat) is supposed to be able to run better on lower memory devices. Still, it's usually a good idea to look for a phone with at least 1 GB of RAM nowadays. That said, I hardly play games on my phone, so I'm one of those people who would probably be able to live with just 512 MB of RAM, at least for a while.
The phone has Jelly Bean 4.2 on board, which is nice. One of the downsides of getting a local brand is that it's less likely that there will be custom ROMs available for it, especially from the likes of Cyanogenmod. So if I were to get this phone, I wouldn't expect to be able to manually install newer ROMs on it. Since that's the case, I'd be glad that the phone already comes with a relatively recent version of Android. The hope though is that the phone will be able to run Jelly Bean smoothly.
It's also great that this budget phone comes with a GPS chip. It remains to be seen how quickly it can get a lock. But at least, the chip will make it more feasible to use maps apps such as OsmAnd (offline) and Google Maps (online), as well as a traffic monitoring app like Waze.
At this price point, I wouldn't expect the phone to shoot particularly good photos. On paper, the phone comes with a 5 MP rear camera and a VGA front camera. Still though, the fact that it comes with a front facing camera at all opens the door to video calls with Skype, Google Hangouts, and other similar apps. So it's still a welcome bit of hardware to have, even if I don't expect the quality to be all that great.
The Lazada page also offers views of the front, back, sides, top and bottom of the phone, and on the whole, it looks alright. Also, consider the fact that Lazada currently offers a P200 voucher, if you sign up for their newsletter. So if you're a new customer, that will bring the price of the Amber down to P2,799. It's quite a deal.
I tried to look for more information on the resolution of this phone. I found this page on the CMK Cellphones site. It's their listing for Cherry Mobile phones. According to the Amber product description, the phone has a resolution of 800x480, which in my view is fine for a phone of this price and size. Just to add, another thing in favor of this phone is that it can handle two sims.
Now, all this is just the information on paper. It remains to be seen how this phone will hold up in actual daily use. Hopefully, the people who do buy it will post reviews based on their actual experience with the phone.
Still, the point is that you're getting a lot of value for the amount of cash you have to pay. I can still remember how, years ago, you had to pay so much more in order to buy a phone with specs that were way inferior to the Amber. I think it's great that local hardware companies are really competing, not just to bring the price down, but also to push more features and better specs to their entry level phones. Hopefully, this is a trend that will continue.
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