CloudFone Excite Prime 2 Price is Php 5,999, Has Good Specs and 'Awesome' Selfie Camera

Earlier today - July 4, 2017, courtesy of our friends from local handset company CloudFone, I - along with my tech blogger buds and members of the media - rode a helicopter from NAIA compound all the way to Mabalacat, Pampanga to get a memorable race car experience at Clark International Speedway. (I'll talk about this experience more extensively in a separate post; For now, if you're interested, you may check out photos in my Instagram and Facebook accounts. Thanks!)

The unique theme of this tech event is inspired by the top-notch features CloudFone handsets that excite consumers - similar to the feeling you'll get when riding a chopper through the clouds and over the sea - and give them an awesome overall experience - just like the thrill of riding a top-caliber race car.

Following the extreme activities, CloudFone reps took the opportunity announce their latest campaign slogan 'You Deserve Awesome Selfies' and in line with it, unveiled two new selfie-centric midrange Android Smartphones.

Donning an official suggested retail price of Php 5,999, CloudFone Excite Prime 2 - shown in these photos - is the more affordable of two models but it's just as interesting and feature-packed.

Having played with the handset, I'd say this model has three main strengths or key selling points.

The first one would have to be its design and build.

As you can see in these images, CloudFone Excite Prime 2 flaunts a very slim form factor making it easy to hold and keep in the pocket.

The phone's shell is crafted from aluminum and has chrome-plated accents, which makes the device look elegant and opulent when viewed both up-close and from a afar.

Having a real metal shell also makes the smartphone more durable or more resilient to the knocks and bumps of daily use.

The second thing that's great about this release are its imaging capabilities.

The phone's 13 MegaPixel autofocus camera features a 5-Element-Lens, a wide f/2.0 aperture, and a Sony IMX135 sensor, which performs well in low light conditions. You can rely on this camera to deliver pretty clear shots even when you use it indoor or with artificial lighting.

The rear likewise supports Super Pixel Mode and Portrait Mode, which gives you interesting bokeh or depth of field effects where the subject's background is beautifully blurred.

CloudFone's move to focus on smartphones that deliver awesome selfies means that they'd have to give their new releases good front-facing camera and the Excite Prime 2 certainly has that.

This handset's 8 MegaPixel front-facing camera, which is located above the 5.5-inch HD IPS display panel, features the company's software innovations including a new camera interface reminiscent of what's on the iPhone as well as screen flash that comes in handy in low light situations.

The camera software also includes a built-in multi-level Beauty Mode, which instantly evens out the user's skin-tone and enhances good facial features to deliver selfies that are ready for sharing on social networking sites.

The third thing that I like about this model is its decent set of internal technical specifications -- given the phone's price, of course.

Under the hood, CloudFone Excite Prime 2 runs its heavily customized Android 7.0 Nougat operating system with a MediaTek MT6737 processor that incorporates four ARM Cortex A53 cores and a Mali-T720 GPU. This chipset is complemented by 3GB of RAM and 32GB of expandable storage for all your photos and videos.

CloudFone Excite Prime 2's set of innards give it an Antutu Benchmark Score of 27,712 when we ran the test after the phone's unveiling. This score pretty much reflects the rather smooth overall mobile experience that the handset delivers; Touch response is good and you'll experience rather stutter-free multitasking experience.

3D gaming experience will be decent on titles that aren't so taxing on resources. Otherwise, you'll get what you can expect from an Android smartphone in this price echelon. Here's the phone's Manhattan 3.1 frame rate score.

CloudFone Excite Prime 2 will be available at all CloudFone kiosks and partner outlets across the country within July 2017. It will be available in a number of colors, including Gold, which I featured in this entry. Overall, if you're currently on the look-out for a sub-Php 10,000 selfie-centric Android phone with good design and decent specs, you might want to include this one in your list of devices to check out.