The mid-range smartphone segment has seen tremendous growth over the last couple of months. There has been something of a flood in this range of smartphone, which is a good thing for consumers. To weigh in more, Lenovo has announced its latest mid-ranger, A7000, which is a sequel to A6000, the cheapest 4G LTE smartphone. We are at the launch event happening in New Delhi and got to play around with the device for few hours. This is our hands-on and first impressions of the device.
Design
The new Lenovo A7000 offers almost everything you can expect from a mid-range smartphone in 2015. Talking about the design, it has a polycarbonate build that looks and feels sturdy and solid. It gives a great feeling in the hand, which is certainly rare on a budget friendly mid-rangers. Those thin bezels on the sides of the display make a way for an easier handling experience. While at 7.9mm thickness and weighing around 140 grams means it is easy to hold the device.
Even though, the device is made out of plastic; it didn’t instantly turned into a smudge house, meaning the material used on the back is preferably matte. With large screen size, it was obligated to feel uncomfortable while holding the device, but we had reasonably opposite feelings when we hold the device, it was grippy and handled well for a 5.5-inch device.
Hardware
The A7000 features a 5.5-inch 720p IPS LCD display, which is certainly a good pixel per density considering the competition in the same price range. It comes packed with MediaTek MT6752m True8Core chipset that clocks at 1.5 GHz. Accompanying it is the ARM Mali-760 MP2 GPU and a 2GB of RAM. The combination should give a good overall performance. Talking about the internal storage on the device, it packs only 8GB of it but can be expanded up to 32GB via a microSD card. So, let’s not worry about the storage space, because it is in par with current competition going on in the Indian smartphone market.
In terms of the camera, the device sport an 8MP rear shooter with LED flash and a 5MP front shooter for selfies. When it comes to battery life, it lacks a little against competition with 2900mAh battery rating, opposed to 3000mAh on Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G and Huawei Honor 4X, while it has win over 2600mAh battery on the Yu Yureka.
The Interesting stuff that the company has bundled up with its latest mid-ranger is the Dolby Atmos sound technology, which is the first that any company would be offering on their smartphone. With this audio enhancement, users would be able to experience theatre like sound entertainment experience on their headphones. We didn’t get to test that today, but certainly looking forward to that once we start using it as daily driver.
Software
Lenovo has been great with its UI integration on their smartphones since the past couple of months. The Vibe UI (or Lenovo Launcher) doesn’t have a separate app drawer, and it also boasts some many other great interface features. It’s not the best Android skin out there in the market, but it certainly is not the worst. You can rely on its snappy performance, as well as neat looks that gives it something beautiful to offer.
Though, it is surprising to note that the device is based on the latest Android 5.0 Lollipop OS, it’s because it doesn’t take an influence from general aesthetic of the user interface of 5.0. But rather provides its highly customized skin on top taking over the scene.
Initial Thoughts
The A7000 is stuffed with a great set of hardware for a mid-range smartphone, and its biggest selling point is the budget-friendly price point of INR 8999. This would make a good addition to its portfolio of budget smartphones in India seating with A6000 and others. We would be testing the device for couple of days and would get back to you with full detailed review of the same.
