The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
Lucio Gabor / Gadget Review
RARELY, if ever, have I had a chance to celebrate Chinese New Year right at the heart of Chinatown in Manila. So when a friend of mine asked me to join him for a Food Wok in Binondo for the countdown on the ‘Year of the Wooden Sheep’, I dropped all plans for that day and hopped on his SUV without hesitation.
As it turned out, it was a right decision, after all.
The monstrous traffic jam on the way to Binondo hardly affected my appetite for Chinese delicacies on this very important date. The aroma of hakaw, chicken feet, sharks fin siomai and the delicious spring rolls that we saw along the way had already overtaken my sanity.
So after pretending as customers just to be allowed to park in front of a commercial bank, we sprinted our way over 200 meters for the first stop restaurant. There, we joined a group of American tourists and fellow blogger/writer already sipping chicken corn soup and eating bun with sweet caramel filling.
It was a fine and perfect way to usher the Food Wok.
But what made the experience more exciting was when we tried a Microsoft Lumia 535 smartphone to capture stunning images around Chinatown.
With its 5-inch screen, 5MP rear camera and the 5MP wide-angle, front facing camera, Lumia 535 is an ideal companion for this kind of food trip.
The tour provided us the opportunity to use the Lumia 535 camera app that captures images with the help of the manual adjustments of the ISO and shutter speed similar to professional cameras. Interestingly, it has also apps such as HERE Maps that gives you directions to various places even when offline. The Lumia Selfie app was also a lot of fun and exciting to use mainly because it fits more people on the screen without destroying the background images.
And after four stops, we finally settled in one of the famous cafés in the area where we consumed crispy buttered chicken, friend rice, lechon macau and vegetables soute in garlic.
All the food and action were captured instantly, beautifully by Lumia 535. (See sample pictures).
Really, the Lumia 535 dual sim is big on experience.
To get more details of this smartphone check this out:
Key Features:
Always the latest Windows Phone experiences like Cortana, Office and OneDrive, built-in and free.
Seamless integrated video calling experience and high quality selfies with 5 MP wide-angle front camera.
Accessories:
Headset: The Boom by Coloud
Speaker: The Bang by Coloud
Size: 140.2×7.45×8.8 (volumetric) mm
Weight: 146 g
Colors: white, black, green, orange and cyan
Processor: Qualcom Snapdragon 200 (MSM8212) 1.2 GHz quad core processor
Memory: 1GB RAM, 8 GB internal mass memory + up to 128 GB Micro SD & 15GB free One Drive cloud storage
Market price: P5,990