It's been years already since we had a review from this particular local smartphone brand way back from their previous Knight Elite phone model. Recently, the guys from Starmobile knocked on our virtual door to check it out their one of the first Android handsets with Android 7.0 Nougat plus 700 MHz LTE band support out of the box
Here is the Starmobile Up Prime first with the front and back views of the box. I love that the brand even at this year continues to maintain to put in all of the technical specs that you may ask in the package
The front has 5 inch TFT HD display and 5 MP front camera plus the standard Android capacitive buttons. The display is a-ok to me compared to a number of TFT HD display counterparts that I saw in some competing local brands
The back has 8 MP AF BSI main camera with flash, single speaker and the removable back cover with Starmobile logo in it
Here is the view of the phone when you remove the back with dual micro SIM and micro SD slot. Even though that there's a free Smart LTE sim inside, good to know that both SIM slots are openline.
The top has 3.5 mm. audio jack while at the bottom, it has the pin hole microphone and micro USB port. Quite sad that it does not have OTG support
Aside from the phone and the free Smart SIM with mobile date freebies, it has the user manual, micro USB to USB cable, earphones an 5V 1A charger
On the UI, Starmobile chose to have almost stock Android 7.0 Nougat which is quite needed for an entry-level Mediatek MT6737 quad-core processor to run nicely together with it's 1 GB RAM and 16 GB ROM. It will be not as fast as your typical midranger for between 2-3 times the price but it was worthwhile to run some basic apps like in social media as well as some light multitasking. Out of 16 GB ROM, you will gonna get over 10 GB of app storage which is good enough
On connectivity, definitely the 700 MHz LTE support was the shining star of this budget phone as I am getting higher than the average speeds that I get from my hub using a Smart SIM which is also fun for me to use it as a mobile hotspot too especially for blogging. The rest like calls, texts, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS were also good.
On the benchmarks, Starmobile Up Prime at over 30k on Antutu plus it has 2-point multitask. If you took a closer look at the box earlier, the declared sensors worked fine to me.
On battery, it was quite impressive that the brand was able to pack a 3,000 mAh removable battery inside a 5 inch Android phone. At over 12 hours in our battery rundown test with it's 28 nm powered SoC, the results were a-ok. In the days that I used this as a daily driver with my moderate usage, I can survive on it in a 16-hour workday with average of 4.75 hours of screen on time. Charging took me usually at less than 3 hours
On camera department, this is where the brand did a bit of tweaks to justify it's pricing as both shooters come in an f/2.8 aperture. The camera UI was already that we saw way back from Android 4.4 Kitkat days. Daylight and gloomy shots are a-ok for social media but when night time strikes, the phone camera was almost useless to create a good pic. My sample selfie though is pretty good for a typical 5 MP camera
Camera samples:
Starmobile Up Prime rear camera samples
Starmobile Up Prime front camera sample
On the verdict, I think that for the Php 4,290 price tag listed on Lazada Philippines, Starmobile Up Prime just priced it right compared to less powerful and no LTE support of Cherry Mobile Flare P1 or more affordable compared to the one with the same SoC but has more RAM and better cameras with the Cloudfone Excite Prime 2 but with Php 700 pesos. The free mobile internet from Smart (as long as you load a certain amount to qualify) and 700 MHz LTE band support were some of the strengthss of this budget Android phone but how I wish the brand chose to have the Google Camera UI, at least 2 GB RAM and OTG capability. I will gonna give 4 out of 5 for the Starmobile Up Prime
