CloudFone Special Edition Hands-on, First Impressions

CloudFone has a lot of announcements from their last week’s event and one of the highlight among their latest crop of handsets is the CloudFone Special Edition. What’s special about it? Well, it is bundled with Marvel, Star Wars, or Disney packages.

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For starters, the Special Edition has a 5-inch IPS LCD with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. On top of that is a 2.5D curved scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass. Pumping it up is the new Intel Atom X3 quad-core 64-bit processor clocked at 1.0GHz and has a Mali-450 MP4 graphics. It’s paired with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage which is expandable via the microSD card slot.

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Picking up the device will reveal its chamfered aluminum frame that is a joy to hold especially when it’s cold. The front is occupied by the 5-inch display, with the usual earpiece, sensors, and front-facing camera above it. Below are three capactive buttons with no backlighting. On the right side are the volume rocker and the power/lock button while the left side is bare.

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On top is the 3.5mm headphone jack and at the bottom are the micro-USB port and the microphone pinhole. The back houses the 8-megapixel primary camera along with its dual-LED flash and the loudspeaker down below. You can also see the CloudFone logo and Intel branding imprinted on. It’s a removable back cover that gives access to the dual SIM card slots and microSD slot. Unfortunately, the 1900mAh battery is sealed and there’s no way you can swap it on the go.

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For the build, I’d give the handset a thumbs up thanks to its choice of materials. Also, the back plate has a handsome brushed metal finish. It’s also textured and matte, so there’s no need to worry about nasty grease marks.

When it comes to benchmarks, we immediately installed Antutu 6.0 and it managed a score of 19,622. Not the highest around but initial performance has been stable and smooth. We’ll be doing a review of the CloudFone Special Edition to see how it will fair with everyday usage, benchmarks, and the like, so stay tuned.

CloudFone Special Edition specifications:
5-inch IPS LCD (1280 x 720 pixels), 294ppi
2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass
1.0GHz Intel Atom x3 quad-core 64-bit processor
Mali-450 MP4 GPU
2GB RAM
16 internal storage
Expandable via microSD, up to 32GB
8-megapixel rear camera w/ LED flash
2-megapixel front camera
Dual SIM / Dual Standby
3G HSPA+
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 4.0
USB OTG capable
GPS w/ A-GPS
1900mAh battery
Android 5.1 Lollipop

It will go on sale for Php4,999 and as mentioned earlier, Disney protective cases and headphones are included in the package.

Daniel Morial

This article was contributed by Daniel Morial, a film school graduate and technology enthusiast. He's the geeky encyclopedia and salesman among his friends for anything tech.