Sharp SH631

The is a new player in the Philippine smartphone market, and it has a pair of very interesting offerings. The new player is Sharp, and the more interesting offering is the Sharp SH631.

The Sharp SH631 has a large 4.5-inch display, with a decent qHD (540 x 960) resolution. The phone runs on Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with a Sharp Feel UX UI. Like a Nexus phone is has soft keys on the display rather than dedicated buttons. However, it does not follow the standard Android 4 three key format, and instead displays four keys. The large screen is fitted in a trim 127.6x 66 x 9.5 mm package which weighs in at 117 grams. 

The phone is not speed demon, coming with a dual-core 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, on a MTKMT6577 chipset, and PowerVR SXG531T graphics processing unit. lower end The PowerVR card probably being it bottleneck. Also, the phone comes with 512 MB of RAM, which is the minimum required to run Android 4.x.

Internal storage is only 4 GB, but it does come with a MicroSD card slot. The battery is a decent sized 1650 mAh unit. You also get a 8MP primary camera which can record HD video, and a VGA front camera. All the other expected functionalities are there, with HSPA, A-GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.

All in all not terrible exciting, but also not bad for the Php14,990 asking price.