by Jonathan Kevin Castillo
MyPhone has recently launched a hot new device for their latest Agua lineup, the Iceberg. It looks impressive in the outside and manages to boast a ton more underneath.
The Iceberg has some cool features: the Clever Motion, which allow commands through gestures. Such as the Wave to Capture Image, which takes photographs when the camera is on by waving the user’s hand across the touch panel. It also comes with a local Filipino app called TARA. It stands for Theft Apprehension and Asset Recovery Application, which disables the device if it is lost or stolen.
The innards of the Iceberg came with mixed feelings but the experience itself was impressive. It runs on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, and sports a 5’7-inch device that sports a dual SIM card slots, 1.2 quad core processor, 1GB RAM, 3G DualBand, a 12- and 5MP rear and front camera, Bluetooth 4.0, a magnetic sensor, and a 16GB internal memory.
The screen features a 720×1280 IPS HD display with Corning Gorilla Glass 2 technology. It’s colors and responsiveness are remarkable. We’ve watched several HD movies here and we can honestly say, wow – this is better than expected. myPhone boasts an Active Lockscreen, where the user can press the lower-center hexagon and drag it across the screen to instantly open the camera, message box, settings, or other menu without unlocking the screen first.
Because of its size, it’s hard to send text messages one-handed, but the large screen has a comfortable grip to play games or use other apps on. It sports a back aluminum finish, which we like very much. It is smooth, cool, and premium in style and feel. There is no removable battery, and instead only the top-most part of the rear cover can be removed for the dual-SIM card slots. Audio quality is fine and if there is some difficulty in hearing even on max volume – who doesn’t use earphones lately?
The 12MP rear camera does a decent job in taking images. The front 5MP camera was just as effective – have fun with selfies. The Iceberg sports 1080p video recording that is well received for outstanding quality. Wave to Capture Image is the best and most effective Clever Motion that was tested. A single wave and it immediately took a photo without hesitation.
The downside is the lack of an expandable memory card slot. But 16GB is already quite large and should suffice for a good number of music, videos, games, and other apps and data. It comes with several pre-installed apps, which may or may not be of the user’s interest. If it isn’t, remove and replace them as seen fit. A possible reason why the elimination of an SD card slot is the availability of cloud services, such as Drop Box. It’s also noteworthy to have an account, so all those other data can be saved and accessed in more places than the mobile device.
The 2600mAh battery life has a striking reliability. On full charge, we left the device on stand by for a couple of days and when we next checked on it, it still had about 85% battery life. When Wi-Fi, Clever Motion, and other features have been disabled, the Iceberg lasted the entire day of games and movies half of the day, and we still had more than enough by the time we reached home.
We really like the Iceberg and believe it’s worth the buck if you want a good device at this size. Most of its issues as mentioned earlier are easily remedied with good alternatives that we think the company anticipated would be used to make room adding other quality features.