Dragon Phone - Cherry Mobile

Along with the Magnum 2X and Dragon Phone, Cherry Mobile also sent us a review unit of the Supreme 10.1” tablet which was released November last year. Although the timing of the review for this tablet is a bit late, we thought to give our readers a proper intro about this slate. Catch the full review after the break.

Design & Construction

The Cherry Mobile Supreme tablet features a rather bizarre looking 10.1” capacitive LCD screen. In an attempt to differentiate it from other tablets, the Supreme strayed away from the conventional display design and went for an almost TV-like structure. From the buttons to the logo at the back, it’s safe to say that this slate is intended to be viewed when oriented horizontally than in portrait mode.

The tablet is almost entirely made of plastic which doesn’t add to its already hefty weight. We liked the plastic matte finish of the tablet’s back portion because it doesn’t attract too much fingerprint. The tablet doesn’t give a flimsy feel on the hands. The only thing that we didn’t like about the tablet’s build is the bezel around the screen because we find it too thick.

The 2MP snapper and the tablet’s sensor can be found on the thick bezel just above the screen.

Most of the key components of the tablet can be found at the right part of the tablet. Looking at the front there’s three physical buttons for Home, Menu and Back. All the ports on this are also located on its right side namely an HDMI, Mini-USB, AC and Audio port. Still on the right side, underneath the three buttons is a compartment where the SIM slot as well as the micro-SD card slot is stashed away.

There are four shiny buttons for the volume rocker, Power and Search at the top portion of the tablet. Separating the two set of buttons are two holes for Reset and Recover.

There’s not much on the back of this device besides compartment for SIM and micro-SD card slot. Oh and there’s the big white company brand and the model printed on the black plastic matte.

Multimedia

This tablet’s 10.1 TFT LCD screen has a pretty decent resolution pegged at 1366×720 pixels. This translates to 153ppi pixel density. It’s not the crispest display we’ve seen from a tablet’s screen but certainly not the worst. Watching movies with the tablet is relatively pleasurable. Given its TV-like design, this slate should give its users a rather decent viewing experience. Outdoor legibility is not that great though and it can be challenge at times reading under direct sunlight.

The sound coming out of this tablet’s loudspeaker is a bit too soft for my liking. I often find myself missing a couple of lines in the movie especially in parts where the characters speak in low volume. For a better movie watching experience, we highly suggest plugging a pair of headphones.

Performance & Benchmarks

The 10.1 Supreme is equipped with a dual-core NVidia Tegra 2 processor which is clocked at 1 GHz paired with 1GB of RAM. It may not be as impressive on paper as it was when it was first released but it’s still pretty decent. The tablet was able to handle most of the things we threw at it quite smoothly. There were slight lags on the games that we’ve played but not to an annoying point. Other applications run like a charm and we rarely see them crashing.

In terms of performance benchmarks, this tablet was also able to garner pretty decent scores. It’s not the best results we’ve seen from a tablet but certainly one of the best among other tablets on the same price range. AnTuTu scored it 5008 while Quadrant scored it 1995. Lastly, NenaMark 2 scored it at 19fps only.

OS and UI

When it was release last year, this tablet comes pre-installed with Android 2.2. Just months after it was released, Cherry Mobile released an OS update for it for Gingerbread. Surprisingly, when we booted up the tablet, it has ICS out of the box and we confirmed with Cherry Mobile that they have already released another OS update for their 10.1” tablet for ICS.

Cherry Mobile didn’t do too much to differentiate this tablet’s OS from other ICS tablet out in the market. The company didn’t put any skin to mask the stock ICS UI. We’re not saying it’s bad but maybe we’re just used to Cherry devices having OS skin on top of the stock OS.

Because of the lack of OS skin, it won’t take a deal of time to get used to how to navigate your way through the device’s options, which was a plus for us. We did however encounter some bumps along the way while we were playing around with the tablet. It’s nothing really serious, just a handful of slight missteps in responsiveness in some commands especially on the soft buttons of ICS. We believe that the OS build is the culprit for this, since the tablet originally came with an older OS. 

Typing with this tablet is rather comfortable given the size of its screen. The keys are big enough and are well-spaced. 

Camera

The camera in this tablet is what you’d typically expect out of a 2MP snapper. Nothing really surprising, but should suffice for capturing stills and your video calling needs. The only thing we didn’t like about it is that the camera’s position. It’s placed almost at the right hand corner of the tablet, which often results to photos and videos to be unbalanced. It takes a bit of adjusting and tilting to get a decent shot. Other than, it does what it is supposed to.

The camera app doesn’t offer much of an option to enhancement in terms of taking a picture unlike other ICS tablets. There are three modes in the app, Still, Clips and Panorama. We don’t if anyone would be using the Panorama feature of this tablet anytime soon, but we guess if the need arises it’s good to know that you have one.

Battery

The battery life of this tablet is actually pretty impressive. With light usage with the WiFi left on with SNS apps running on the background and occasional browsing, it got us through almost two days before we reach for the charger. 

We were able to watch 2 movies that run almost 2 hours each with the same settings we have for the light usage and still have a couple of juice left for an hour worth of gaming. On heavy use with 3G connectivity we typically get 5-6 hours out of it. Speaking of which, we also encountered a bit of a hiccup on the 3G functionality of this tablet.

We experienced connectivity loss every so often. We believe that it may be because the device doesn’t support 2G and that our connection fluctuates from 2G to 3G or sometimes jumps to HSPA and vice versa. But at times when the connection is at its best, we didn’t experience any drop in internet connection.

Conclusion

Since it was released last year there have been many other Android tablets with the same if not better specs than this tablet. But as always, Cherry Mobile’s leverage is their product’s affordability and their 10.1” Supreme is no exception to that. For Php14,999, this is certainly one of the more decent tablet we’ve seen in that price range. Although the horizontal design with the too thick bezel surrounding the screen is a bit disappointing, we think that it’s something we can live by considering the other good features that this tablet possesses such as its exceptional battery life. This tablet is available at Cherry Mobile booths located at malls around the country. 

Cherry Mobile Supreme tablet:
10.1” TFT LCD display @ 1366×720 resolution, 153ppi
NVidia Tegra 2 processor 1GHz dual-core
NVidia AP
1GB RAM
8GB internal storage
up to 32GB via microSD
HSPA 14Mbps
Bluetooth 2.1
2MP Front-facing camera
Li-Ion battery
Android 2.2 (upgradable to Android 4.0.3 ICS)
Php14,999 (suggested retail price)

What we like about it:

• Battery Life
• Display
• Affordable price

What we did not like:
• Design and Build
• Not so optimized OS
• Connection drops due to lack of 2G support