Cherry Mobile FB100 Review

Cherry Mobile has a smartphone for those who just can’t get enough of Facebook. It’s a blue phone with a dedicated button complete with a shiny Facebook logo for quick access to the site’s app. But will it please you social media needs? Here’s our review of the Cherry Mobile FB100.

Design and Construction

The FB100 is a candy bar phone that has a 5-inch display with an overall generic design and polycarbonate build. Above the screen are the selfie camera, earpiece, and a LED notification light.

Just below the display is a physical button sporting the bright blue Facebook logo. The button feels cheap though and it even gets stuck sometimes when pressed.

To the right-hand side is just the volume rocker. This leaves the left to house the power-lock button. It’s a rather unusual layout compared to most Cherry Mobile handsets we already reviewed.

To the top is the 3.5mm headphone jack placed in the middle with a tiny pinhole for the secondary microphone just beside it.

The bottom end of the phone has the micro-USB port for charging and data transfer plus the main microphone. Both are placed to the right.

The rear of the FB100 screams the color blue with its matte back cover. We personally like the finish although it attracts grease and prints easily and they are not simple to wipe clean. Here we have the main 8-megapixel camera and its lone LED flash. There’s a slit down at the lower center for the loudspeaker.

In terms of build and design, there’s not much to expect from the FB100 aside from the striking blue hue. It’s your run-of-the-mill Cherry handset dipped in Facebook color.

Display and Multimedia

The 5-inch display has a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. That results to a crisp 294ppi which is more than enough for browsing through your social feed. It’s also an IPS LCD panel so you get wide viewing angles with vibrant color reproduction and good contrast. There’s a reddish warm tint going on here as well.

The loudspeaker on the back is really tinny and of low-quality. It’ll do as a speakerphone but it won’t do justice for music and videos.

OS, Apps, and UI

Running on the phone is Android 6.0 Marshmallow and it’s got no customization or what so ever. It’s loaded with system apps, Google services, and few Cherry Mobile made apps. Facebook and Instagram come pre-loaded but you’ll have to update it first to its latest version.

Since the handset is labeled for use with Facebook and even comes with a dedicated button, we expected to have a Facebook integration like event syncing, contacts, images, and whatever Facebook offers. Although there none of that. Pressing the button justs opens the Facebook app and it’s not even programmable for other use.

Storage wise, you can use 3.39GB out of the 8GB total. There’s room for expansion via the microSD card slot.

Camera

The cameras onboard are kinda basic with just an 8-megapixel main sensor and a 5-megapixel selfie shooter. The rear shooter captures decent stills that’ll be fine for casual shots meant to be posted to a social account. Although, checking them out on a PC shows muted colors but at least it’s detailed enough. It’s got a single LED flash to help in low-light scenarios. Here are a few samples:

As for video, it can do 1080p in .3gp format. Quality is nowhere near HD and it looks like a blown-up VGA video. To our surprise, it has 2-channels for audio which is basically stereo but the overall quality is nothing to write home about. Here’s a sample clip:

The FB100 is a bit lacking in the camera department and it’s best to tweak your image before sending it to the internet.

Performance and Benchmarks

The handset is powered by a quad-core MediaTek MT6580 processor clocked at 1.3GHz with the Mali-400MP2 GPU. It’s paired with just 1GB of RAM and for a handset marketed for social media apps, it’s going to choke. We all know that the Facebook app eats up a lot of resources and memory, and others as well since they now have a lot of features to offer.

Since we have a fresh handset, it’s relatively smooth throughout. There are occassional hiccups when switching apps but nothing major so far. Although once the phones get loaded with a lot of stuff, things will be different. Gaming is mediocre since it can run low graphic settings only and the limited memory will not be enough for intensive apps.

We ran our usual benchmark tests and here are the scores:

• AnTuTu Benchmarks v6.2.6 — 24445
• PCMark — 2595 (Work 1.0), 1655 (Work 2.0)
• Quadrant Standard — 8018
• Vellamo — 1524 (Chrome), 730 (Metal), 1156 (Multicore)
• 3DMark — 2020 (Ice Storm Extreme)

Call Quality and Connectivity

Calling on the phone is fairly standard with surprisingly two microphones onboard. The earpiece has good enough volume for hearing the other party while the noise-cancelling microphone works pretty okay.

The handset will give you 3G connectivity speed, not LTE. So don’t expect fast uploads on the go. It also has the basics like Wi-Fi when connecting to a hotspot or home connection and Bluetooth for pairing with other wireless devices.

Battery Life

Providing juice to the handset is a removable battery cell with 2,000mAh capacity. It’s really small for a phone with an HD display and it shows in our battery test. Using the PCMark battery test (Work 1.0) is was able to last for 7 hours and 21 minutes.

Conclusion

If only the FB100 has something more than just the Facebook button to differentiate it from the usual crowd of budget Androids, it’ll be an interesting device to play and use. Although, the lack of software integration just makes it an ordinary smartphone with low specifications to meet a certain price.

This one retails for Php2,999 in Cherry Mobile stores and kiosk nationwide.

Cherry Mobile FB100 specs:
5-inch HD display @ 1280 x 720 resolution
1.3GHz MediaTek MT6580 quad-core processor
Mali-400MP2
1GB RAM
8GB internal storage
Expandable via microSD, up to 32GB
8MP rear camera w/ LED flash
5MP front camera
Dual-SIM
3G HSPA+
Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n
Bluetooth 4.0
GPS w/ A-GPS
2,000mAh Li-Ion removable battery
Facebook button
Android 6.0 Marshmallow

Pros:

• Sharp display
• Good build
• Noise-cancelling microphone

Cons:

• So-so battery life
• Tinny loudspeaker
• Mediocre video recording