An Average Phone with Some Pleasant Surprises. Review on Lenovo P780

Hi Everyone, Recently a good friend bought the Lenovo P780 for himself and I got to use it a lot and of course check out all the features and play around with it, It's been a week and now one can safely get a decision on  the phone.

First off, this is not some high ended gadget, It sits firmly in the mid-segment with its Rs. 15000/- Price bracket.So expectations weren't that high.

SPECS:

-Its a 5 incher

-Android 4.2 Jelly Bean

-1 GB RAM

-8 GB internal/Ext Card slot available

-Quad-Core MediaTek Processor 1.2 Ghz

-8 MP Camera

-4000 mAH Battery

-Dual SIM

BUILD QUALITY, SCREEN, GENERAL USAGE:

Now first off, when you hold the phone it feels very good and solid. Has a Matte Plastic body but the back cover is Metallic and it's good at resisting fingerprints. It's well put together and feels sturdy. The battery is Non- Detachable though. But overall impressions of the build are good.

Press the power buttons and the screen lights up. Now its a 240 ppi screen so its isn't bad at all. The text seems well rounded and crisp enough for the average user. Looked closely its of course not retina quality but good at this price point nevertheless.

There's a standard Android home screen and menu with a grid layout. There are options of hiding Apps and customizing their arrangement. Flicking through Menus and tabs is quite quick enough. Lenovo has avoided bloatware and instead added its modifications to Default apps and named the "SuperCamera" and "Super Gallery" instead.

Setting Menu has a dedicated tab to Motion and Gesture settings. Personally I find them useless.

ANDROID SOFTWARE FEELS INCOMPLETE:

The Android skinning in this phone is quite interesting. Lenovo has 4-5 themes preloaded which change the general look of the menu and icons and fonts. There are some weird things though, the dialer(call) icon and few other icons looks blurred and not as clear as the other ones which feels a little odd and incomplete to look at. There are NO Widgets for clock and other small stuff like calendar etc!

Only the installed apps have their widgets and the shortcuts are just icons placed on the home screen.

Such lack of widgets make the Home screen look very empty. Of Course one can visit the Play store and download the required widgets but maybe im too used to getting preloaded widgets in the other phones. But still a basic digital clock/date widget should have been there.

The notification bar has all the icons are lined up in a single line so you have to swipe sideways to access them.

MISC:

Loaded a few normal games like Subway Surfer and Temple Run which ran normally. I haven't put in heavier games so cant say whether it'll handle them nice. One peculiar thing is the RAM usage with almost no apps running(Except background services). On idle it uses about 65% of the 1 GB ram. So multitasking is iffy.Normal apps(Watsapp/Browser/FB/Calling/ Texts /Music) work well though.

But if one were to open few heavy apps simultaneously I doubt whether it would be able to run them efficiently Haven't Tried yet so cannot definitively say. Sound Quality is just about Good. Camera has very mediocre low light capability but well lit photos come out great. Two very good things are that its a quick camera and there are tons of options in the camera app for manual settings.

Lastly, the best feature of the phone has to be battery. TWO Days Flat. But I have to admit it being used on a single SIM instead of 2 SIMs. However one can comfortably expect 1 FULL day of usage with Data ON and 2 SIMS loaded and moderately heavy usage, The battery is very good and refuses to go down. 4000 mAH is very good for averagely specced phone like this.

Another concern is future updates on the Android software, Whether Lenovo provides continuous support remains to  be seen,

FINAL THOUGHTS:

If you are an Average user with little WhatsApp/Facebook/ Browsing and calls/Music etc with a tight budget this might be the right fit. And you get an added advantage of an Awesome Battery life and Good Non-cheap looks as well. If you can put up with the Software drawbacks then you could go for it.

Thanks for Reading!