ALTHOUGH I had initially been skeptic about it, or any other local mobile-phone brands for that matter, crashing into the market today, I am now deeply enamored with the Happy Mobile Neo Lite.
Normally I would list 10 other things a local mobile-phone brand can do, like it can serve as a wedge to keep the window open or something that would come in handy when you’re caught amid a gang trouble. But you get your hands on the Neo Lite, and, for a while there, it occurs to you that this is never a joke and, in fact, something you don’t want to be wet in the rain.
The 4.5-inch Neo Lite reminds me of my lost Sony Xperia C3, which doesn’t necessarily mean a copycat, but in the sense that it is conferred with the same regard you give a foster child you adopt when your son dies of a terminal illness. It’s the interface that says it all, but compared to the C3, the Neo Lite goes warts and all sans all the necessary price to pay, but, golly, you don’t put a price tag on love and, as far as the feel is concerned, this is close a second.
What with the square edges and a geometric pattern embossed at the back cover, the mobile phone’s exterior lends a regal fit to it, no matter that the detachable cover is polycarbonate plastic, which, aside from the default black and white, is in wee kawaii colors (rose fuchsia and ocean blue). Even when you use it in the open and in broad daylight, the sharpness of the display doesn’t miss a detail. My issue with the Neo Lite—apart from its not-so-trusty 8-MP rear and 2-MP front cameras—though, is the keypad. Typing on it is comparable to when you play hopscotch, where, just when you thought you hit the right square, you realize for a while there that you’ve missed it. It is, however, a gap shrug-able and smaller than the sum of its parts, because, even at its simplest, the Neo Lite is a quantum leap vis-à-vis just about anything in its local mobile-phone category.
I didn’t much care about my Neo Lite, or any phone for that matter, running on Android Lollipop OS, its 1-GB RAM, 4-GB ROM and its quad-core CPU, what I know more about is that I had never a scintilla of problem with the fluidity in fiddling with the cell phone—and with its 2000-mAh battery I had been fiddling on it for all of two days—even when I have a queue of 15 tabs.
Browsing and watching videos online is seamless, what with the 2G, 3G, quad-band, dual-standby network, which was, to me, a tad inaccurate because the actual speed is, like the phone’s any other feature, surprisingly more than overcompensating for its specs, especially for a smartphone that is less than P3,500.