Cherry Mobile Zoom Unboxing, First Impressions

Cherry Mobile has a new line of smartphone that features big battery with support for fast charging. Dubbed as the Zoom, Cherry wishes to address the woes of road warrior consumers when it comes to their phone’s juice. Here’s our quick unboxing and initial impressions for the Cherry Mobile Zoom.

To start off, the Zoom comes in a neat-looking box with contrasting black and orange hue. The picture printed on the box shows off of a good-looking handset that seems to be crafted from metal but that handset itself is not, we’ll get to that later.

The Zoom shows itself upon opening

The retail package includes the operating manual, earphones, a micro-USB cable, and a large fast-charging brick.

What’s in the box: user manual, 5V/2A charger, micro-USB cable, earphones

The device sports a standard 5-inch HD IPS display but its screen-to-body ratio is rather undesirable. As mentioned earlier, the printed image on the box is misleading.  The display is surrounded by a thick black bezel and more on the top and bottom. Upon the first encounter, we mistakenly press the black bottom bezel thinking it’s where the navigation buttons are.

The Zoom with its thick bezels

There’s an 8-megapixel front camera at the top together with the earpiece and a couple of necessary sensors.

Just the power button on the right

On the right is the power button, and that’s just it. The volume rocker is separately located on the left-hand side.

The volume rocker is on the left

Up top is the 3.5mm headphone jack while the bottom houses the micro-USB port for charging and connectivity plus the microphone pinhole.

3.5mm jack on top

Mic pinhole and micro-USB port at the bottom

On its back is the main 13-megapixel camera with a single LED flash and the speaker grill down below. The rear panel is removable and has a brushed metal look despite being made with plastic. Despite of having an accessible battery, the cell is screwed on and not user-replaceable. The dual-SIM slot and dedicated microSD card slot for expansion here as well.

The back of the Zoom

The device is powered by a MediaTek MT6735P quad-core chipset running at just 1.0GHz. While the processing is on the low side, the RAM is generous at 3GB with spacious 16GB of expandable storage.

Sorry, the battery is sealed

The battery has a rated capacity of 4000mAh which could translate to days of power, depending on usage. It’s also the culprit in giving the handset a thick profile. Cherry claims that it supports fast charging using the included 5V/2A charger in the box.

Cherry Mobile Zoom specs:
5-inch IPS LCD @ 1280 x 720 pixels
1.0GHz MediaTek MT6735P quad-core processor
Mali-T720 GPU
3GB RAM
16GB internal storage
Expandable via microSD
13MP rear camera w/ LED flash
8MP front camera
Dual-SIM
4G LTE
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, dual-band
Bluetooth 4.0
GPS w/ A-GPS
4000mAh non-removable battery
Android 5.1 Lollipop

The Zoom is your average smartphone brick from Cherry but with big battery on its back for Php 4,999USD 85INR 7,222EUR 81CNY 620. We’ll test how long it charges from 0 to 100 in our review within the week. Stay tuned!