Lenovo has today launched its latest budget smartphone – Lenovo A5 in India. The smartphone comes for Rs 5,999 for 2GB variant and Rs 6,999 for 3GB variant. It will be available on Flipkart.
With this, the brand is trying to make its presence felt in the budget segment. We got the chance to spend a couple of days with the Lenovo A5 and this is what we think of it.
Design and Display
Starting with the design, Lenovo A5 comes with a plastic back and a metal frame which seems to be of decent build quality. There are round-edges on the phone and it comes with a curved back which makes the device comfortable to hold in hands.
At the display top, there lies the front camera along and an earpiece and usual array sensors. On top, we have only a 3.5 mm Headphone jack while on the bottom, there is a Micro USB port and a secondary microphone for noise cancellation. On the right side, we have power on/off button and volume rocker buttons and on the left, we have a dual SIM slot.
The back panel of the device consists of a single camera setup with LED flash. There is also a circular fingerprint sensor at the centre and at the base of the back panel, there is Lenovo as well.
For this budget, the Lenovo A5 was found to be good in build quality in our brief testing. The phone is also easy to use with a single hand and found to be comfortable while using due to its compact design. The phone is very light and it weighs just 160 grams.
Now coming to the display, the phone with 5.45-inch HD+ IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with 720 x 1440 pixels in resolution. The A5 sports the trending full-screen display with 18:9 aspect ratio. During our brief testing period, we found out that the display looks compact and the colours look good considering this price point but with an average outdoor visibility. However, it would be interesting to see how well it will perform during our review period.
[[VIDEOID=1372]]
Hardware and Software
On the hardware front, the Lenovo A5 is powered by a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6739 Processor coupled with 2GB/3GB of RAM and 16GB/32GB of internal storage. The memory is further expandable up to 256GB via micro SD card slot. The Chipset used here is entry-level and so is the device. Clearly, the phone is not targeted for some heavy users. But for normal usage, the phone can be considered as one is easily able to switch between applications like Gmail, Maps, Youtube, and more. However, it is too early to comment on the performance of the device, but on papers, it looks like it will give competition to other popular smartphones like Xiaomi Redmi 6A, Realme C1, Infinix Smart 2, and Yu Ace, which happens to fall in the same price category.
Under the software section, the smartphone comes loaded with Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box with the company’s own custom interface ZUI 3.9 on top. Further, the device comes with the set of preloaded apps like UC Browser, Truecaller, Beauty Fit and several games App like Asphalt Nitro, Bubble Bash 3 and more. The user interface has its own hits and misses and we will talk about this in details in our upcoming review.
Camera
Now coming to the camera department, the Lenovo A5 has a 13MP rear camera that has f/2.2 Aperture and LED flash that captures sharp and detailed photographs. The camera has various modes like autofocus, geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection and panorama. For selfies, the phone comes with an 8MP shooter that has f/2.2 aperture lens as well.
During our brief testing period, we found out that the device taking decent photos in proper lighting conditions but the same can not be said for low-light pictures. The selfie camera also did a decent job in out testing time. We will be using the Lenovo A5 thoroughly over the next few days and will let you know the camera quality in a detailed full review.
Battery and Connectivity
The Lenovo A5 packs a non-removable 4000mAh but it comes without any Fast charging support. With this battery, one could easily make through the day, however, we will come with a detailed review of the battery performance of the device after some days.
Connectivity options are standard including 4G LTE, dual-SIM, GPS, Bluetooth 4.2, microSD card slot, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, micro USB port and FM radio. As for the Sensors are concerned, it comes with Accelerometer, Proximity sensor, and Light sensor.