50% Off Cherry Mobile Orbit-Specs In Review + Sale Updates

May 18 03:51 2011 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

The Cherry Orbit and the GSmart G1310 – look familiar?

Since there’s a big sale on the Cherry Mobile Orbit coming on May 19, (that’s just a day away, mind you) many people have been asking our site what we think about the device. Everybody’s wondering if it’s a good phone and worth their hard-earned money. By a mixture of our own deductions and information from our contact at Cherry Mobile, we’ll try to let you know what to expect this Thursday so you’ll know what you’ll be getting. Here’s our specification review of the Cherry Mobile Orbit Android phone.

The Cherry Mobile Orbit is actually what appears to be an OEM Gigabyte GSmart G1310 dual-SIM, dual-standby Android smartphone with a few tweaks. They both share appearances and most specs – as Android 2.2-powered, 528mhz devices with 3.2” capacitive screens. The resolution of 480×320 is actually higher than usual – since 320×240 is the norm in this category. Most of the features are the usual Android – but its worth noting that this is a dual-SIM/standby phone. That said, it also needs to be mentioned that only SIM 1 can use 3G – so keep your 3G using SIM on the first slot. Unlike the GSmart, our Cherry Mobile contact confirmed to us that the Orbit will have FM radio and LED flash – things that the Gigabyte-branded phone doesn’t have. Phones of this caliber though, won’t run Flash content on the web browser, because you’d need a faster processor. (They do typically have YouTube apps though – and they work fine.)

We’ve tested a Cherry Mobile Android with a 600Mhz processor before, with the same 480×320 screen and similar specs and software. Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja worked decently on it. Overall the 600mhz seem pretty ample processing power for most tasks. It doesn’t pinch zoom on images quickly, but other tasks are done at a respectable clip. Using that as comparison, we’d say the slightly slower 528mhz Orbit can perform pretty well. We could be wrong, but we’d wager that the probability of us predicting right is 80%. The phone we tried could also handle WiFi hotspot functionality without hitches, even if a bunch of us hopped on to its network. Finally, the Nova has a plastic body, and the other Cherry Android we tried had what we think was a metal body, so its 50/50 if the Orbit would have a metal body or a plastic one. Though, even with the plastic Nova, it was solid in the hand and didn’t feel like brittle plastic. Overall, we think the Orbit will prove to be a capable phone that performs admirably for its price.

We’ll let you know more about it as soon as we get more information – but that might end up to be after the sale. Meantime we hope this article gave you a better idea on what to expect with the Orbit and help you decide if you’re getting one this Thursday. Remember, its 12NN to 9PM on May 19, 50% off on the Orbit – bringing the price down from PHP13k to PHP 6.5k. Sale happens on SM North, SM Cebu and Lim Kat Kai Mall, CDO. We might be at the SM North Cherry store to get one or two. If you see us, say “Hi!”

Update: From Cherry Mobile Facebook page – free screen protector for your Orbit, and the available units are more than 300 for SM North.

Update 2: Looks like the 528Mhz processor is just slow enough to make Angry Birds too choppy. It’s not enjoyable to play at this state. We apologize for the error. We have a unit right now and navigation is responsive, but it looks like big games like Angry Birds will be slow.

Thanks to our commenter, Muhammad, for the tip about the GSmart!

Source Image: GSMArena