It’s been a long time coming. First Lenovo phone that i wanted to buy was Lenovo Vibe X2. For some reason, didn’t buy it. Second Lenovo phone that i wanted to buy was Lenovo A7000, wasn’t able to buy it in time. I guess this is what they call ‘third time lucky’. Although there’s no such thing as luck in this world.

Hardware

Well, Lenovo K3 Note is available for such a price that you can’t expect it to come with premium build quality. But whatever it comes with isn’t half bad. It’s build quality is decent. And one feature that people love at this price range is there. It has user replaceable battery and cover. Tt weighs 150 grams and is only 8mm thick.

This phone comes with touch capactive buttons right below the screen unlike most of the phones that comes with on screen button now a days but the buttons don’t glow though so in the dark you have to be careful with what you press. But then again always memorize the buttons after all there are only three buttons in definite order there. It also comes with notification LED.

Display

Lenovo K3 Note comes with a fairly good 5.5 inches full HD IPS LCD display for the price. Its got good viewing angles and colour reproduction but it’s not that bright and feels a bit dull. Thankfully it comes with display colour settings to set the display according to your liking.

Benchmarks & Gaming

Since this is one of my ‘all in one’ review. Benchmark and gaming performance is also going to be included in the review post and is not going to get separate post.

Now, for benchmarks. Well, Mediatek 6752 isn’t a weak chip-set by any means even at full HD resolution, it performed pretty well in off screen benchmarks. But benchmarks are just that, benchmarks. They can’t really give you an idea of real world performance.

For example, even after scoring more than 45,000 points in Antutu this phone couldn’t play Asphalt 8 at high settings without stuttering or frame skipping. Why is that? Answer is pretty easy the full HD resolution. Even Sony Xperia C4 that comes with the same chip-set but at double the price couldn’t play the same game smoothly either, why? same reason, full HD resolution.

HTC Desire 820s also comes with the same chip-set but it can play it smoothly at high settings, why? Because it comes with HD resolution. There you have it. Either turn the graphics settings down a notch or turn the resolution to HD or lower. Since you can’t do the latter only choice you have left is to play the game at medium or low graphics settings.

Below are all the benchmark results gaming footage is in the review video.

Antutu

3DMark

PCMark

Vellamo

GFXBenchmark

Geekbench 3

Camera

It comes with 13MP rear facing camera with dual LED flash and 5MP front camera. Both support full HD recording. The image quality from both the cameras is nothing exceptional it’s just decent as you can expect because of the price. In bright day light just like any other camera it performs pretty good but in low light it performs like a cheap chinese phone. Thankfully its flash performs pretty decently.

Also, in the image it takes, colours comes out a little off for some reason. Sometimes the image looks washed out and over-brightened. The camera itself doesn’t pick up that much natural light though. It’s not that it’s a bad camera it’s just that it doesn’t take crisp and clear image. And it also takes images full of noise and never picks up the minute details.

You can say it takes pretty ‘muddy’ photos. Below are some shots in various lighting conditions and video recording sample is in the review video below.

Multimedia

Music quality of this phone both in speaker and headphones is very good. But only with Dolby Atoms features on. Otherwise the music sounds very flat in headphones and the volume of the external speaker becomes too low. And just like every other phone with this chip-set 4K video playback is not supported. Videos at full HD resolution looks very good on its screen.

OS/Storage/RAM

Lenovo K3 Note runs on Android version 5.0 Lollipop with Lenovo’s own Vibe UI on top. And it operates like watered down version of Xiaomi’s MiUI which is a good thing since Xiaomi’s MiUi is pretty heavy UI. The more light the UI the less RAM it will consume and the less it will stutter or freeze. And hence Lenovo’s Vibe UI didn’t stutter and remained lag free while i was using the phone.

Storage wise, it comes 16GB of internal storage out of which you’ll get close to 10GB free which you can further expand through micro SD card up-to 32GB and it also comes with ‘Default write disk’ option so you can choose either internal or external storage as your main storage for everything except apps and app data.

RAM is 2GB out of which you will get around 1.1GB free when nothing is running in the background. This phone does not have the option of ‘move to SD’ but it does support USB OTG.

Performance

For 10,000 Rupees the price to performance ratio of this phone is excellent. You can’t ask for more at this price, simple as that. Phone remains smooth and lag free because of the Mediatek 6752 which includes 8 Cortex A53 processors clocked at 1.7GHz and Mali T760MP2 GPU.

The best part is the phone never for even once reached temperature higher than 40 degree Celsius(even while gaming) when i was using the phone. This is the first phone with this chip-set that has run so cool even under heavy load. Nice feat from the affordable fella. Not even the phone that is much more expensive than this phone can do that. Yes i am talking about Sony Xperia C4.

There’s not really much there to type about this phone in this section, since this chip-set itself is like a good performance approval seal. And because of the price it becomes an even better deal.

Connectivity

Call quality, i didn’t really check but i can safely say it would be decent if not good none the less. WiFi though of this phones is pretty fast. I am guessing it’s dual band WiFi and it doesn’t lose signal that easily either. Rest of the connectivity features includes Bluetooth 4.1, AGPS, GLONASS, Dual SIM(micro SIM).

Battery

Lenovo is promising up-to 36 hours of continuous talk-time on 3G on this phone. It might be possible looking at the size of the battery (2900 mAh) i don’t think it’s ever really going to happen though. Especially 36 hours continuously? sounds kind of impossible keeping in mind that we are talking about a smartphone here.

Now if they meant as in not continuously and with every thing off or power saver mode on all the time, then it might happen. And to give you an idea i downloaded the whole Asphalt 8 game and bunch of benchmarks on this phone when my battery was at around 95% by the time i was done the battery was down to 70% in around 2 – 2.5 hours.

This phone is very good at sustaining the battery life though. Unlike some phones which you check at night before sleep at 90% and when you wake up, you find it at around 50%. This phone doesn’t ‘leak’ battery life like that.

Verdict

Sometimes i think who am i to give verdict about anything. But then i think it’s kind of fun so who cares. Anyway coming to the phone, well around this price you might think you have a lot of choices but in reality you don’t.

How? you may ask. Well, all the phones around this range are almost the same. Sometimes it feels like some unknown Chinese company makes these phones and then sell them without labels to bigger companies to sell with their stickers on them. So, you can expect a feature packed phone but you can’t expect quality at this price. Because in this budget section it’s all about quantity not quality.

Lenovo’s service is pretty good though, my laptops’s charger once stopped working a few months back it was under warranty so i called the service number and in like 3-4 days i got a new charger at my doorstep in place of the old broken one.

I don’t know if that’s the case with their phone’s service too, the box does come with “Lenovo’s Assured Service & Warranty” though. If you have experience in this matter you can share it in the comments below.

Here, i give this phone my imaginary seal of recommendation too. If you can over look its camera quality, this phone is great buy for just 10,000 Rupees.