Today, the stage was taken by the Sharp Aquos S3 Mini, a mid ranger that is basically an Essential PH-1 clone, with a price tag way lower than the flagship.
Sharp Aquos S3 Mini Design and Specifications
Nothing new in this department. Like I said earlier, the Aquos S3 has a front design that looks exactly like that of the PH-1 with the only difference being the presence of the fingerprint scanner on the bottom bezel. The display is a 5.5-inch InCell panel with a resolution of 2040 x 1080 pixels. It has an 87.5% screen-to-body ratio. The notch houses the 20MP front camera with support for AI. The back has a 2.5D glass back where the 16MP camera rests.
Powering the phone is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 chipset coupled with 6GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 64GB of on-board storage expandable via microSD card. That’s flagship level memory configuration. Sharp could’ve cut it down to 4GB and 32GB, lost the unnecessary 2.5D glossy-like-a-new-paintjob glass and gone with a dual camera setup.
Gizchina News of the week
A 3020mAh battery runs the phone along with Android Nougat and Sharp’s Smile UX. It comes with Face Unlock that has a response time of 0.1 seconds. The phone does not skip on the 3.5mm jack, even after sporting the USB type-C port. It does lack NFC though, which shouldn’t be much of a problem since the use of NFC is not as widespread.
Sharp Aquos S3 Mini Pricing and Availability
The S3 Mini is available for pre-order on Jingdong for 1599 Yuan and is available in three colours, blue, black and gold, all of them glossier than lip gloss.
Its 2018, I’m not preordering an Android 7 phone.
Almost nothing added to 8.0 TBH.
Easy to refresh to 9
7 isn’t
I say no to Foxconn owned brands (InFocus, Nokia, Sharp). They rarely update their phones, they’ve rebranded some InFocus models to Sharp to milk their recent acquisition and many Sharp phones ended up being sold for cheap, which means that they are quick to abandon supporting their devices. As for Nokia, unless they are serious about sharing their source codes and start unlocking the bootloaders of their phones, I’d prefer a Xiaomi to any of their phones.