View Post

Cherry Mobile Flare 5 review: incremental improvements

In Phones by Ramon Lopez6 Comments

HERRY Mobile, the leading mobile brand in the Philippines, unveiled six new Flare smartphones last month. Devices, it hopes, will carry the Flare label past the “5 million phones sold” mark in 2016. Much of that burden falls on the Cherry Mobile Flare 5, the cheapest of the bunch. Priced at P5,499 — a tad higher than the Flare 4 (pictured in the background above) that cost P4,999 at launch — it falls into the company’s most profitable demographic whose tastes are often ultimately swayed by price.

View Post

Beyond the Box reveals iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus prices

In Phones by Ramon LopezLeave a Comment

HE wait is nearly over for Apple fans around the country. Beyond the Box, one among several official Apple resellers in the Philippines, recently posted the off-contract prices of all iPhone 7 (click for complete specs) and iPhone 7 Plus (click for full specs) models on its social media accounts and website.

View Post

10 smartphones powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 821

In Phones by Ramon LopezLeave a Comment

PEED has always been a big talking point within the smartphone community — though we would be quick to argue that having more CPU cores and more RAM are not necessarily as advantageous as some companies make them out to be. The iPhone 7, to wit, has a quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM, but it handily beats its Android counterparts in real-word and synthetic tests.

View Post

LG V20: How much it will cost, when it will be released in PH

In Phones by Ramon LopezLeave a Comment

G Philippines has announced the price and date of availability of its other signature phone, the LG V20. This Korean manufacturer’s counter to arch-rival Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7, which is now discontinued after a botched recall and multiple fire reports, is the first non-Google handset to ship with the new Android 7.0 Nougat operating system. We’ve listed it as a good alternative to the Note phone.

View Post

Samsung outs P13,990 Galaxy J7 Prime in PH

In Phones by Ramon LopezLeave a Comment

AMSUNG will be happy to put the second half of 2016 behind it, but that’s not to say it’s done for the year as far as releasing smartphones is concerned. The troubled Korean manufacturer today announced the Samsung Galaxy J7 Prime in the Philippines, which joins Vietnam and India as the only countries to have the lower-midrange phone on offer.

View Post

Already affordable Vivo V3 Max gets a price cut in PH

In Phones by Ramon LopezLeave a Comment

E don’t usually write about markdowns for consumer electronics (because street prices fluctuate like gas prices) — but today, we’re making an exception for a deal that we think is too good to pass up. That is, if you’re in the market for a capable smartphone and expensive flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Apple iPhone 7 are out of the question.

View Post

Being a first adopter doesn’t always suck: Our case with Smart and Globe

In Business by Ramon LopezLeave a Comment

EING an early adopter can have its downsides and its share of negative consequences. It can be soul-crushing when a Kickstarter project fails miserably. In rare cases, it can even leave you with a fire hazard that is the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. But being first has its own advantages, too. And some of those perks can be worth the risk of inconveniences in the long run. My Revü Philippines partner Alora Uy Guerrero and I have had the luck of the draw on our side on two separate occasions, both involving the Philippines’ largest telecom operators. Allow us to expound.

View Post

NBA 2K17 review: As real as it gets

In Games, Apps, and OS by Ramon LopezLeave a Comment

(Note: I will be coming out with another piece detailing NBA 2K17’s MyCareer and online modes. I feel that they deserve more focus and more hours spent playing them.) remember my first game in NBA 2K17 so vividly. I set up a rematch of last season’s NBA Finals, reigning NBA champs Cleveland Cavaliers, squaring up against Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and the rest of the Golden State Warriors.

View Post

Starmobile UP Sense is a P4,290 phone with fingerprint sensor

In Phones by Ramon LopezLeave a Comment

e haven’t heard much from Starmobile lately. The last we heard was the local tech company gained distribution rights for TP-Link networking products in the Philippines back in August. On September 13, it announced a new product, the Starmobile UP Sense, its first-ever device with a now-ubiquitous smartphone item: the fingerprint sensor.

View Post

IFA 2016: Lenovo’s Yoga Book could be the tablet of our dreams

In Tablets by Ramon LopezLeave a Comment

uspend any thoughts of Lenovo as a smartphone company momentarily. It’s important, because the Beijing-headquartered giant that acquired IBM’s PC business in 2005 excels in making devices designed for productivity first and foremost — and it has for years. Its latest product, the Lenovo Yoga Book, prides itself on tradition, on a heritage of storied engineering. But it’s also a bet on the future of portable and productive computing.