Vernee announced earlier this year the first mobile that was to come out of the company, the Vernee Apollo. The device was announced to feature a 1440p display, 6 GB of RAM, 128 GB of internal memory and various other high-end specs at a reasonable $399 price tag. Till today the company hasn’t released the Apollo, marking the fifth month since the initial pricing announcement. On the other hand, the company has since then released two other phones, one low-end phone called the Thor and the other is a mid-to-high range phone called the Apollo Lite, which we will review now, a Lite version of the yet-to-be-released Apollo.
Design
The Vernee Apollo Lite dimensions are 152 x 76.2 x 9.2mm, numbers that shows we are speaking about a thick mobile. The front area of the mobile consists only the proximity sensor, the front-facing camera and a earspeaker visible on the top of the phone’s face. The company has placed a bright multi-color notification light located to the left of the proximity sensor, but it can be seen only when it is active. On the left side is the sim tray and on the right there is a volume rocker with a power button located directly under it. On the top of the mobile a 3.5mm headphone port exist. On the bottom side we can see the USB Type-C charging/data port flanked by two speaker grills. On the back we see the main camera with the dual-tone flash, and directly under the camera is a squircle-shaped fingerprint reader. The phone’s body is made out of zinc-titanium alloy and the top/bottom parts are from plastic. The phone comes in two colors: ‘Moonlight Silver’ and ‘Space Grey.‘ The Space Grey variation comes with a black front-housing and deep purple rear-housing, and the Moonlight Silver variation comes with a white front-housing and grey rear-housing. This also means that the bottom and top parts of the Moonlight Silver’s rear-housing are painted to simulate metal, making them look even sillier. The 2.5D curved display also has the black bezels of death that are heavily exaggerated in Moonlight Silver variation due to the contrast between the white face and the thick, black bezels that lay siege to the display. The Apollo Lite has a 5.5 inch 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass 3 Sharp IGZO screen with 1920 x 1080 pixels screen display.
Hardware
The Apollo Lite is equipped with the deca-core Mediatek Helio X20 which has three sets of different cores in the SoC that are switched on or off depending on the demand. In detail, there are four low-power ARM Cortex-A53 cores that have a max clock speed of 1.4 GHz. These cores will the mobile use after a page or non-graphically intensive app has fully loaded. The next are four more A53 cores are clocked at 2.0 GHz with a minimum clock speed of 1.84 GHz, and at the very high end are two ARM Cortex-A72 cores clocked at 2.3 GHz that are switched on when anything really intensive is taking place, such as gaming. Ultimately the phone can have a single A53 core operating at just 221 MHz, making it really energy efficient, or all 10 cores operating at their full capacity making it quite a powerful phone. The CPU is helped by the 4GB LP DDR3 RAM and the 32GB eMMC 5.1 internal storage. The memory is more than enough to run apps and games with no problem and the internal storage if you find out that is not enough, it can be expanded with a 128GB TF card.
Features
The Apollo Lite comes with an almost stock-standard version of Android 6.0.1. The only extra fetuses that we can find are the MediaTek’s MiraVision, the addition of “Turbo Download” (downloading files with both WiFi and cellular networks at the same time, maximizing the speed) and the ability to customize the on-screen buttons in terms of what direction they run in and which buttons appear on the display. The main camera is a 16MP with a Samsung S5K3P3 sensor and aperture of f/2.0. In situations with a lot of natural light the phone takes excellent pictures. When the light is not that much it begins to have issues with the white balance and contrast. The front-facing camera is a 5 MP Samsung S5K5E8 that has an f/2.0 aperture. The Apollo Lite support Touch ID. The company mentions that the mobile needs just 0.1S to unlock the screen. The mobile supports also Gravity induction, Distance sensor, Light sensor, OTG. Doesn’t support NFC and Notification LED.
Battery
The Vernee Apollo Lite is equipped by the company with the MediaTek’s Pump Express 3.0, a comparable to Qualcomm’s Quick Charge technology. For a fully charge all is needed is about an hour and ten minutes in total, to get the phone charged to 100% from 0%. The included 3180 mAh battery is good enough to get you through a day of whatever you’d throw at it. The IGZO display did quite well when it came to energy consumption, meaning you get more on-screen time in comparison to other display technologies.
Conclusion
The Vernee Apollo Lite is a good mobile, with very good specs and at a price below 200€! When ordering, don’t forget to use our coupon code: AL5 to get it with a 5€ price reduction!