One of the most affordable 18:9 display smartphones is this one from Cherry Mobile which can be considered as an upgrade to the standard S6. Can be this worth it? Here's our verdict on the Cherry Mobile Flare S6 Deluxe
On display and built, this is one of the most delicate Cherry Mobile handsets that I had so far mainly of it's gold variant that I had for review. With it's plastic back casing, the fingerprint smudges can attract easily and also our doubt as the package does not have a free case. A few days after, I just noticed that there were already some scratches on the lower part. On the good side, the curvy profile and display seems pretty good for the asking price. In return, the phone seems light in one-hand navigation which is a pro to me compared to another local phone with the same Soc and SRP
On UI compared to Flare S6, it does not have the Cherry OS which has the same experience as to the Selfie Two which I previously reviewed but with that tall display. The pre-loaded apps like Facebook, Google, Youtube and others can easily adapt on 18:9 but the additional apps that we had, for some reason, it does not have the support or even just to stretch it out like for example, MX Player. We waited for weeks for a possible OTA fix but no good which I hope the guys from Cherry Mobile will check it out soon
Connecitivity is pretty good too from calls, texts, WiFi., mobile data. Bluetooth and even GPS.
The benchmarks and sensors of Cherry Mobile Flare S6 Deluxe are the following
Flare S6 and Selfie Two has the same SoC which is the Mediatek MT6737 quad-core processor so no surprise when we had the Modern Combat 5 and Asphalt 8, the best way to play it were via low settings.
I appreciated that they chose to put an user-replaceable battery. With it's 3,000 mAh capacity, it maanged to have 12 hours in our video battery rundown test. In real-life usage, I usually survived with it in an entire day of heavy usage with around 5 hours of screen on time.
On camera, we saw the same UI as to the Selfie Two with that old-school era of Android Kitkat but I took more attention on the camera quality which is a-ok already for an entry-level device. Image processing speed is on average, more than a second. The selfies were good enough for social media as long as you will not gonna do it in a low-lit area
Although in the Flare line, the Cherry Mobile Flare S6 Deluxe seems like a bit of an upgrade to me of the Selfie Two with it's bigger and 18:9 display. With that path, I love that they put in the near stock Android Nougat (easy to activate the multi window mode), sound, battery and camera for the given SRP of Php 5,999 but little by little other global brands are catching up with small display yet muscle in it's SoC. The biggest drawback to the handset is the inability of supporting the tall display which are not included in the list of pre-loaded apps. I hope a fix will come up very soon. I will gonna give 3.75 out of 5 for Cherry Mobile Flare S6 Deluxe