Fero is a still a fairly new mobile phone company in Kenya and they just launched the budget smartphone, named Vibe, with the aim of shaking things up in the budget segment where we see a sad state of affairs when it comes to the quality of smartphones.
Going with 2018 trends, the phone has a beautiful screen in an 18:9 aspect ratio and a 3200mAh battery that we hope is going to push it to give us a full day and some few hours of charge.
In the box, you’ll get the phone packed in its case, its battery, a pair of earphones, wall adapter, USB cable, a quick start guide and a warranty sticker. When you first set up the phone, the screen will grab your attention. It’s a 5.45″ 720p HD IPS display that you’ll love when consuming media such as watching videos or scrolling through your photos. The front of the phone has minimized bezels than some phones in this budget category. The top bezel houses the front 5MP camera, the selfie flash and the earpiece.
The back is removable and inside is the dual slots for your micro sim cards and also a dedicated slot for an external storage using microSD. The middle of the top back is where the 8MP Camera and its flash is located. We’ll test out its camera capabilities in the full review. But don’t hold your breath on the capabilities, have you seen that price tag? The top part contains both the headphone jack and the USB charging port. The speaker is located at the bottom half of the back and produces decent sound quality of the media you’re currently playing. The earphones included also do their job well.
The phone comes packed with 16GB of internal storage and 1GB of RAM and runs Android 8.1 Oreo GO Edition. Our initial performance tests of the phone has been impressive so far but we’ll have to see how it holds in the long term in our full review.
In terms of the security features, the phone lacks a fingerprint sensor but that is compensated with the facial recognition technology possibly from the Fero Iris phone launched early last year. Unlocking via your face is surprisingly faster than we expected.
We’ll keep playing around with the phone to see if it’s worth your money – stay around for the full review. The device retails for Kes.6,999 on Jumia.
