Truly a budget beast !. Review on Lenovo A7000

Lenovo A7000 which was launched in India on April is a tremendous success to the company after the launch of its predecessor, A6000.When I checked about the A7000, its specs looked good on paper for its price.

A7000 after its unveiling was up for grabs exclusively on Flipkart via flash sales.On June I planned to buy one and I even managed to get one.I recieved it after 4 days and as always flipkart's service was good.Now lets talk about the phone itslef in detail:

1) Design and build:

The phone is quite slim and weightless being a huge 5.5 inch device( phablet) .With regards to appearance, the phone looks good.It has a semi-matte finish flat back( white or black colour) where the camera & the Dual-LED flash is located on the top left corner and the speaker in the right with the lenovo branding in the middle.Coming to the front the phone is all black with no branding and houses the sensors, front camera and the speaker for calls fitted neatly on the top.The volume and the power buttons are metallic and looks really cool.Overall the phone looks great, is slim and is easy to hold eventhough its a phablet.

2) Performance:

The phone packs in a 1.5 Ghz Octa core chipset from Mediatek( i.e MT6752m) along with 2 GB of ram.And as the specs suggests, the performance is good for a phone which is priced under 10k.It can handle every game you throw at it except for some few hiccups, lags in some very high graphic intensive game which you could expect for a budget phone.But mostly in performs well in gaming and doesnt overheats much until and unless gaming is continued for more than half an hour.Day to day performance is very good with smooth multitasking, almost zero UI lags and what else you want a budget phone to be.One of the best part of this phone is its performance.

3) Software:

This phones comes with a custom Lenovo UI called Vibe UI on top of Android 5.0 lollipop( Android 6.0 Marshmallow to be rolled out for this phone on the month of March-April 2016) .The software is fluid, smooth in terms of usability and also allows a lot of customisability but fails in terms of icons, the way it looks.Icons needs to be a little more looked after, needs polishing and also the themes are limited.But worry not, the above mentioned issues are expected to be cleared out once the next update comes out( March-April) .The phone also gets frequent minor software updates( An average of twice in a month) which fixes small bugs.So the software is also good enough except for the limited themes and the not so attractive icons.

4) Camera:

This is where the phone is slightly behind when compared to its other aspects.The phone has a 8 MP rear camera and a 5 MP back camera.Pictures taken in the rear camera'sometimes' arnt colorful and looks dull.Outdoor shots are good but not great.The Dual LED helps the camera in low light situations and overall the rear camera is slightly an above average camera.The front camera is actually good enough and takes good selfies.

5) Battery:

Battery in this device is great and can last for little less than a day with heavy usage and surely a day with normal usage with its 2900 mAh battery

6) Sound:

Lenovo A7000 is the worlds first phone to have inbuilt Dolby Atmos sound feature which enhances the audio to a great extent when listened through the earphones.The earphones provided with the box are average.I would recommend you to use this phone with a good pair of earphones to enjoy the real music quality of this phone( I use the Audio Technica ATH-CLR 100 which are really awesome) .The sound from the speakers are satisfactory with good amount of detail in the audio coming out of it, though it could have been a little more louder.

7) Display:

The phone comes with a 5.5 inch HD display which makes the display vibrant, bright and colors are saturated well.Unfortunately the phone doesnt have any gorilla glass protection but does come with some oleo phobic coating which protects the phone from scratches to some extent.

8) Storage:

It has 8 GB of internal memory which is actually low as these days phones in this price range comes with 16 GB of internal memory.But in real life circumstances you wont complain about this as most of the apps can be moved to SD card( SD card expandability of upto 32 GB) .Also with the upcoming  Android M update even more apps can be moved to SD card.

So to conclude this phone is still one of the best phones you can buy right now under 10k.Also now the phone is no longer under flash sales so you can easily grab one.In addition to that this phone is now even available in retail stores for slightly above than Rs 10, 000 or you can get it for around Rs 9000 online.

By

A.Shibin