 "Lenovo K900 Review")
Lenovo’s strategy to pave a way for itself in the smartphone race seems to be working quite well in its favour. With some very enticing budget offerings already in the market, the company is aiming big now by partnering with Intel to launch its latest CloverTrail+ SoC. The K900 is the first smartphone to be powered by the Atom Z2580 SoC, a more powerful and efficient version of the Medfield. The K900 will play in the Rs 30,000 price bracket, which means it will compete with the Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 as it also falls in the “phablet” category.
Design and build
Shipped in an enticing package, the K900 is a real beauty in every sense of the word. The phone has a very elegant design, with the front being dominated by Gorilla Glass. The handset measures just 6.9 mm in depth and weighs in at 162 g. It doesn’t feel heavy at all, although it’s hard to ignore the massive 5.5-inch display. The K900 feels enormous in your hand and the wedge shaped design is not at all ergonomic. It’s a real task to use it singlehandedly and when you do, the phone tends to slip out of your hand since there’s nothing to grip.
Sleek and stunning design
The rest of the chassis has an industrial design and is built completely using stainless steel and polycarbonate. The fit and finish is quite simply outstanding and feels like it can easily withstand a few drops. There’s a microUSB charging port at the bottom and 3.5 mm headphone jack, microSIM slot, power and volume rockers on either side. There is no provision for expanding the memory, which is one of the biggest sore points of the handset. There’s 16GB of internal memory, out of which only 9.7GB is available for apps and other media.
Overall, the K900 scores big points on build and design, but loses equally when it comes to ergonomics.
Stainless steel chassis is very durable
Features
Jelly Bean 4.2.1 has gone through some very heavy skinning by Lenovo. Most of the features and shortcuts that we’ve seen before are back, albeit in a fresh new skin. Lenovo seems to have taken a lot of the theme and UI features from Go Launcher, as there are a plenty of options to customise the scrolling animations etc. A new addition is Lenovo’s Supergallery, which offers a very Metro-like preview for your images. Lenovo Power is another new addition, which gives you a very comprehensive approach to manage your phones battery life. The app is always running and monitoring your battery and has the ability to automatically switch between profiles, which can be highly customised. The “Settings” menu is also tweaked a bit, with a separate tab for gestures.
Functional UI
The IPS panel boasts of a 1920 x 1080 resolution, thereby bringing the pixel count all the way up to 400 ppi. Text is crisp and sharp to read and videos and images have bright and vivid colours. The new Intel Atom Z2580 is incredibly powerful and ensures smooth operation despite the heavy skinning. This is the company’s first dual-core CPU for smartphones and the two cores run at a speedy 2.0GHz. Coupled with a faster PowerVR SGX544 GPU, we’re looking at some pretty impressive performance.
The new Power management app
Media
Media playback is handled via the stock player, which supports MP3 and FLAC. Audio quality is good, provided you have a decent pair of IEMs. The speaker volume is very good too; alerts and notifications can be heard even in a noisy environment. FM radio is also present.
The stock Jelly Bean player but with a new look
The video player supports MKV, AVI, WMV and MP4 formats up to 1080p. Audio through the rear speaker is fairly loud and is clearly audible.
Connectivity
The K900 is a quad-band GSM and 3G handset with support for a single SIM. Apart from this, we have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth v3.0 to complete the connectivity suite. Sadly, there’s no option for video-out or NFC. Web browsing is handled well with the stock browser or Chrome, and there’s plenty of screen real estate for a good experience. The chipset handles rendering heavy websites very well and there’s no visible lag while zooming in.
Very good for web browsing
Lenovo also bundles a host of other productivity apps like a file browser, Evernote, UC Browser, Flashlight and AccuWeather. Apart from the stock Jelly Bean keyboard, we also have a TouchPal keyboard. For this screen size, we highly recommend a good gesture-based keyboard like Swype or SwiftKey for single-handed typing.
Camera
The 13MP primary sensor boasts of a wide f/1.8 aperture that does a good job in low-light shots. This also helps with very good depth of field in photographs. The quality of pictures is also very good for indoor and outdoor photography. The interface now has a slick new look with plenty of additional features. There are plenty of lens effects and scene modes to choose from, whereas the different shooting modes include Backlight, Macro, Burst mode, Night, Panorama etc.
The various camera features
Excellent camera for indoor shots
The front camera has a 2MP fixed-focus sensor with a wide-angle lens. The quality is once again very good for video chatting indoors.
Battery life
The 2500 mAh battery in the K900 manages very good battery life. The handset ran through our full 8-hour test and in the end, we had about 33 percent battery to spare. We must say, the new Intel SoC has come a long way since the days of Medfield. Not only does the K900 deliver good battery life, it also doesn’t heat up as much.
Verdict and price in India
The K900 is priced at Rs 32,999 and should be available in store shelves very soon. The handset will directly compete with the Samsung Galaxy Mega, Optimus G and the Sony Xperia ZR, which fall under the similar price bracket. However, its real competition in terms of display size is the Note 2, which now retails for well under Rs 30,000. Between the two, we’d recommend the K900 for its processing prowess, excellent build quality and very good camera. Our main issues with the phone is the odd shape, which makes it quite cumbersome to use, and the fact that it lacks expandable memory.
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