Vernee announces the Apollo Lite: an affordable metal beauty

It's a great time we live in when a cool metal construction and a fingerprint scanner lock aren't limited to just the most expensive of smartphones. Fierce competition and aggressive pricing from various up-and-coming manufacturers have raised the bar, and a smartphone can't hope to sell well unless it packs a respectable hardware and the looks to boot. Smartphone slinger Vernee shows that it understands these unwritten rules with its recently-announced handset – the Apollo Lite.

Design

Wrapped in metal, with a Gorilla Glass 3 panel at the front that is arched at the corners, and an ergonomically curved back, the handset looks decidedly modern. The screen is built with Sharp IGZO technology and has a 5.5-inch diagonal and a 1080 x 1920 pixel resolution. Thanks to an impressive screen-to-body ratio of 72%, its footprint is still fairly manageable, measuring at 5.98 x 3 x 0.35 in (152 x 76.2 x 8.9 mm). The Apollo Lite has a set of sleek-looking hardware buttons on its right — a power key and a volume rocker. There are no capacitive navigational controls on the front, since the phone utilizes Android's own virtual buttons. There's a fingerprint sensor at the back, which also has the capability of waking the screen, and can unlock the phone for as fast as 0.1 seconds.

Hardware and camera

On the inside, it's powered by MediaTek's own Helio X20 SoC with with 10 cores split in three clusters, each designed to handle a different type of workload (Tri-Cluster technology). It has 4 GB of LPDDR3 RAM and 32 GB of internal memory, which can also be expanded via microSD of up to 128 GB. The handset's USB port is of the reversible Type-C variety and also supports digital audio output, if you happen to own a pair of Type-C earplugs, but there's also a standard 3,5 mm audio jack to be found at the top. The device comes with a pure, untampered with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, but if you want a Vernee signature experience, you will be able to download the company's own VOS operating system from its support forums.