Cherry Mobile Iris Hands-on, First Impressions

Having a fingerprint scanner on a smartphone was a hot feature before. Only the flagships and a few upper-midrange devices had it until it eventually became available for budget devices. How about the iris scanner? It’s one of the key features of the resting Galaxy Note7 and a few high-end devices in the international market. But, Cherry Mobile will give it to you for Php3USD 0.05INR 4EUR 0.05CNY 0.37.5k. This is our first impression of the Cherry Mobile Iris.

The Iris looks like your typical Cherry Mobile budget handset. It’s made out of plastic with a decent build but don’t let the modest look fool you. Upfront is the 5-inch IPS LCD packing 1280 x 720 pixels. The display is bordered by a fair amount of bezel separating it from the trio of capacitive keys below and a number of sensors on top where the main feature of the phone is found. Aside from the usual front-facing camera and proximity sensor, there’s another camera that sees in the dark and scans your pupils with the help of infrared.

Setup is fairly simple and straightforward. It’s even faster than the cumbersome setup of a fingerprint scanner. Just tick the settings to use iris scanning for unlocking then let the phone peek into your eyes during initial setup and you’re done. In practice, unlocking with the iris scanner takes less than a second given that the phone is right in front of your face.

Back to the phone itself. As mentioned, it’s made out of polycarbonate with rounded corners. The volume rocker and power-lock keys are both situated on the right-hand side leaving the left voided of any.

The bottom end of the phone only has the microphone as the micro-USB port and 3.5mm jack are located on top.

The rear of the phone features a clean design with just the main 8MP camera smacked in the middle with its LED flash on the side. The loudspeaker is located just at the lower end.

The phone is pretty basic in terms of specs, aside from it superior iris scanner. Inside is a MediaTek MT6580 quad-core processor with just 1GB of RAM. Storage is expandable, thankfully, since it only has 8GB built-in. There’s no LTE here as the radios rely on 3G HSPA+ technology. Everything is handled by Android 6.0 Marshmallow and removable 2300mAh battery.

Cherry Mobile Iris specs:
5-inch IPS LCD @ 1280 x 720 pixels
1.3GHz MediaTek MT6580 quad-core processor
1GB RAM
8GB internal storage
Expandable via microSD, up to 32GB
8MP rear autofocus camera w/ LED flash
5MP front camera
Dual SIM (Micro)
3G HSPA+
Wi-Fi
Bluetooth
GPS w/ A-GPS
Iris scanner
2,300mAh removable battery
Android 6.0 Marshmallow

The Cherry Mobile Iris is a rather rare handset but it only cost Php3,499USD 60INR 5,055EUR 57CNY 434 in stores. We’ll be doing a review soon for this to test out the main feature and its everyday performance.