Cherry Mobile Cosmos U Review: It’s beautiful & elegant

The Cosmos line of Cherry Mobile has been known as the premium line of Cherry Mobile. The most affordable of them all is the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U and fortunately, I was one of the first people to try it out. But yeah, this is just an engneering unit that’s why there are still some flaws in the unit itself.

The build quality of the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U is one of its strongest points. It sports a metal accents which makes the feel more solid and premium. The rear and the front sports a glossy patterned design just like the Samsung Galaxy S4. The unit that I got is an engineering unit that’s why there are squeaks and slight openings but you can already feel the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U is very solid thanks to its metal sides

The buttons were well placed but the volume button and power button were placed higher than I expected that’s why it is much harder to reach but it’s not really a big issue for me. The curves of the phone was  good too. The Cherry Mobile Cosmos U is really nice to hold thanks to its nice curves and the smaller bezel. The device weighs just right but you might feel that it is a bit heavier than other phones because of its metal sides.

The Cherry Mobile Cosmos U has a 5″ IPS HD display. The display looks nice but unfortunately, it isn’t a Super AMOLED display unlike the other member of the Cosmos family. It’s not oversaturated and the display looks just right. The colors,viewing angles and the sunlight legibility was good and the display was very responsive however, I notice that the blacks on the display aren’t completely black unlike other displays. Despite its shortcomings, I can still say that the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U’s display is still good.

Cherry Mobile Cosmos U’s micro USB port is placed at the bottom right and yes folks, it supports OTG. Inside the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U is an 8 GB internal storage. If you feel that the 8 GB storage inside it isn’t enough, you can opt for a MicroSD card and install the apps there. And yes, you could put both Micro Sim and Mini Sim inside.

The battery of the phone is rated at 2000mAh and It was able to last up to a day of average use. The phone might not survive a day at work if you’re using it heavily for games and mobile data but nonethless, I think the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U’s battery isn’t that bad, It’s actually longer than I expected. The audio quality of the phone sounds just right too and I got no complaints with it.

The Cherry Mobile Cosmos U also have a special feature called Cherry features. 3 of the 5 features were borrowed from Samsung and these are Smarty Stay, Smart Unlock and Smart Call and the remaining two can only be found on the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U. One of them is Smart Anti-touch, this feature is very useful especially to those people who kept on unlocking their phones accidentally on their pockets. With this feature, the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U will not unlock even if rubbed to a fabric. You might find the Smart Magic funny. Why? because this feature enables you to unlock the phone by just blowing the microphone. To make it even funnier, I shall call this feature as blow to unlock.

The Cherry Mobile Cosmos U runs on Android 4.2.2 and there are no word if this phone will be updated to Android 4.4 Kitkat. This smartphone comes with some apps pre-installed like EFXpress which is a built-in video editor. There’s an Easy finder app too which is a protection against snatchers and it’s also a kill switch in where the phone will automatically wipe if an intruder tries to unlock your smartphone.

The Cherry Mobile Cosmos U was able to get a score of 16941 on Antutu. I think that’s great and there might be probably some improvements on the retail unit since the unit that I’m reviewing right now is an engineering unit. When it comes to games, I tried NBA 2k14 and yes, there were no problems playing that game on the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U however, heavy games like Edge of Tomorrow and Godizilla doesn’t run on the smartphone. You’ll be able to play some heavy games on this smartphone but don’t expect very smooth frame rates when playing those games.

Just like its bigger Cosmos brothers, the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U has an 18 Megapixel camera and yes it’s interpolated but don’t worry, the camera quality was pretty good compared to the Cherry Mobile Cosmos X which I reviewed a few months back. The camera of the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U is sharper than the Cosmos X but sometimes, the images that I took still lack colors but shooting at lowlight conditions has improved and the Cosmos U can focus on objects faster than I expected. The video recording was pretty good too and focusing while recording was pretty fast and accurate. Although the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U has a better camera than the Cosmos X, I still think there’s a lot to improve on the camera. When zooming on images, the images are not yet that clear. Check out the sample shots below.

I really love the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U’s metal design. The back of the phone might be made up of plastic but the metal sides of the phone make it premium and very elegant but I was disappointed not to see a Super AMOLED display on this smartphone. Despite not having a Super AMOLED display, I think the device biggest strength is its design. Yes folks, the Cherry Mobile Cosmos U is beautiful. It’s elegant. It’s premium.

The Cherry Mobile Cosmos U has an SRP of 8,999.

Note: This review unit of Cherry Mobile Cosmos U is an engineering unit. There might be some changes in the retail unit.