LENOVO K4 NOTE

Lenovo Vibe K4 Note Review

TO BUY

Lenovo launched Vibe K4 Note, the company’s latest mid-range smartphone and the successor oflast year’s K3 Note in India recently at Rs. 11,999. Even though it has a 5.5-inch display and offers Dolby Atmos audio experience, similar to the K3 Note, this has a completely different design and also includes a fingerprint sensor. For the price, specifications of the smartphone look good on paper. How about the overall experience? Let us find out in the complete review.

Unboxing

We unboxed the K4 Note recently, check out the unboxing video.

Box Contents

• Lenovo K4 Note smartphone in Black color
• 2-pin charger (5.2V-2A)
• Micro USB cable
• Clear case
• Quick start guide and warranty information

Video Review

Display, Hardware and Design

The Vibe K4 Note has the same 5.5-inch display with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels and a pixel density of about 400 PPI. Since it has 450 nits of brightness, it is bright, offers vibrant color output, sunlight legibility and the viewing angles are good too. Even though the display is glossy, it doesn’t attract fingerprints easily. It also has Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection to prevent the display from scratches. It has a screen-to-body ratio of 71%, almost similar to the K3 Note, even though this has dual front-facing speakers.

It has a 5-megapixel front-facing camera with OmniVision OV5693 sensor and f/2.2 aperture. The front-facing camera is good for selfies and video chats. Colors are vibrant and the images are sharp as well. There earpiece is also present under the speaker grill. The usual set of proximity and ambient light sensors are present in the bezel, above the display. It also has a tiny notification LED on the right corner, which glows in blue for notification and in red when it is charging. It is hardly visible when it’s off. The phone also has gyroscope and magnetometer, which were not present in the company’sselfie-focused Vibe S1 smartphone.

The capacitive touch buttons are present below the display. These are not backlit, but offer haptic feedback when pressed. The second speaker is present below these buttons. Thanks to stereo speakers and Dolby Atmos, audio quality is brilliant. We will discuss more about it in the audio part.

The smartphone has a brushed metal finish on the sides and is 9.15mm thick. The volume rockers and the power button that are present on the right side also have metal finish. The 3.5mm audio jack is present on the top and the micro USB slot is present on the bottom along with the microphone hole.

It has a 13-megapixel rear camera with dual-tone LED flash. You can also see the tiny secondary microphone. Lenovo says that the phone has three microphones, but the third microphone is not visible. The fingerprint sensor is present below the camera. The phone is 153.6mm tall, which is slightly taller than some of the smartphones with a 5.5-inch screen, mainly due to dual front speakers. It is 76.5mm wide, so it is comfortable to hold, but it is not comfortable for one-handed usage, similar to most of the smartphones with a 5.5-inch screen. It weighs 158 grams, which is acceptable since it has a huge battery. The plastic back cover is prone to smudges, but it is not visible since it is black. You can also use the bundled clear cover for an extra protection.

Opening the back cover reveals a huge 3300mAh built-in battery. The primary micro SIM slot is present on the left side of the camera, while the secondary micro SIM slot is present on the right side. The micro SD card needs to be inserted on the side of the secondary SIM, so you need to remove the microSD card if you want to switch the SIM 2. When most of the budget and mid-range smartphones come with hybrid SIM slot, it is a good thing that Lenovo is offering dedicated slots. Overall, the smartphone offers a solid build quality.

Lenovo sold its ANTVR headset for Rs. 1299 along with a phone, and we got the K4 Note VR bundle that was sold at a promotional price of Rs. 12,499 during the first sale. The headset is similar to Google cardboard, but this has a better build quality and supports phones from 4.5 inches to 6 inches. In addition to offering 360-degree experience for movies and videos, it also has a built-in split-screen mode that lets you view the whole UI using the VR glasses. After enabling this option from the ‘Feature’ you can press and hold the power button to turn on this mode.

We did a teardown of the Lenovo Vibe K4 Note recently, here is the video.

Camera

Coming to the camera, the phone has a 13-megapixel rear camera with Samsung S5K3M2 ISOCELL sensor with 1.12 um pixel size, PDAF, f/2.2 aperture and dual-tone LED flash.

The camera UI is simple, has toggles for flash, front camera and HDR. The menu option lets you choose Panorama and also has several Effects (Mono, Sepia, Negative, Memory, Gorgeous, Elegant and Cool). Settings option lets you choose aspect ratio (16:9, 4:3 and 1:1), adjust white balance, ISO (100 to 1600), enable geo location, option to use volume button as a shutter key and more.

Coming to the image quality, daylight shots are decent, but some images seem dull if the environment is not bright. Macro shots are good, but focus is hard most of the times if it is a small object, even though it has PDAF. HDR shots are too bright so colors are not perfect and there are also exposure issues in daylight. The phone doesn’t have a manual mode. Since this is a mid-range phone you can’t expect such features. Low-light shots have noise as usual, but the images are not too bad. Images with flash are decent. The dual-tone flash helps to bring natural tone, but it might be overpowering sometimes.

Overall the phone has a decent camera compared to other smartphones in the price range. Check out some samples below (Click the image to view full resolution sample)

Check out the complete set of Lenovo Vibe K4 Note samples here. It can record videos at 1080p full HD resolution at 30 fps. Video is decent, but does lack a bit in terms of detailing. Audio is crisp since it has a secondary microphone. Sadly, it doesn’t have slow motion recording. Check out the video sample below.

Software

The smartphone runs on Android 5.1 (Lollipop) with Lenovo’s own Vibe UI on top. Android Lollipop brings several new features, including Material design, Multi user support, battery saver and lots more features. The company has not announced when it plans to roll out the Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) update for the smartphone.

Quick setting has several features including Secure Zone, Flashlight, Cast Screen, Wide Touch and Super Power. It also has brightness adjustment slider. You can edit these notification bar icons. You can launch the dialer or the camera directly from the lockscreen.

It has Wide Touch option that lets you create a floating bar for accessing utility apps like camera, music, calculator and more. Smart scene lets you create scenes for different time period or places. For example, you, can set the profile to silent at a particular time, turn off GPS when you connect to Home WiFi and more. You can also create different scenes manually. Since the phone has NFC feature, you can use NFC tags to activate a scene. You can enable ‘Knock to light’ option from the settings to enable double tap to wake the screen up when it’s locked.

Out of 3GB RAM, 2.84GB of RAM is usable, out of which about 1.9GB of RAM is free when the phone is idle with just system apps running in the background. Out of 16GB of internal storage you get about 9GB of usable storage since OS and apps take up about 7GB of space.

You can set the SD card as the default write disk. When set, you can move the compatible apps to it. Again, it is a good thing that Lenovo is offering a dedicated microSD expansion slot.

Fingerprint Sensor

The phone has a fingerprint sensor on the back. Placement of the sensor on the back is perfect, since it is where your index finger rests when you are holding the phone. It is quick to unlock the phone most of the times, immediately after you place your finger on the sensor. It gives haptic feedback only when it doesn’t recognize your fingerprint and also lets you quickly unlock the screen, when the option is enabled. It doesn’t recognize your finger properly if it’s wet. You can only add 2 fingerprints, while some phones offer option to store up to 5. This is acceptable since most will just use the index finger to unlock the phone.

Apps

Coming to apps, the phone comes pre-installed with a lot of apps and games. Apart from the usual set of Google apps and utility apps, it comes pre-loaded with Evernote, Facebook, Gamestore, Guvera Music, McAfee Security, Shazam, Skype, Step Counter, Truecaller, Twitter, WeChat, UC Browser, WeChat, WPS Office, and Tap the Frog HD game.

Music Player and FM Radio

It doesn’t have a separate music player, so you have to use Google Play Music. It can play a range of audio formats and it has FM Radio with recording. Thanks to Dolby Atmos, Wolfson WM8281 audio codec and dual front-facing speakers, loudspeaker output is brilliant and clear even in full volume. Audio output through headphones is brilliant as well, compared to most other smartphones in the price range.

Dual SIM and Connectivity

It has 4G support with support of 4G LTE bands (TDD B40 2300MHz and FDD B3 1800MHz) for India. Both the SIMs support 4G, but you can enable 4G only in one SIM at a time, while the other goes to 2G. You can set the default SIM for voice call, messaging or data connection. It also has Inter SIM call forwarding option that can forward an incoming calls automatically from one SIM to other when it is busy on other call. Call waiting is free but operators charge for call forwarding. It has dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac that you rarely find in phones in this price range. Other features include, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, NFC and USB OTG support. We did not face any call drops or any other issues.

Performance and Benchmarks

Coming to the performance, it is powered by an Octa-Core MediaTek MT6753 processor (Even though CPU-Z shows it as MT6735) with eight ARM Cortex A53 CPUs clocked at 1.3GHz per core and 3GB of RAM. Performance is good without any lags in the UI even though the UI consumes more RAM. Thanks to 3GB of RAM multitasking is smooth too. It gets a bit warm, but we did not face any heating issues during gaming or 4G use. Check out some synthetic benchmark scores.

AnTuTu Benchmark 5

It scored 34833 points in the AnTuTu Benchmark 5 and lies behind the Vibe P1.

3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited

It managed to score 6856 points in the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited GPU benchmark.

Basemark OS II

It managed to score 779 points in the Basemark OS II benchmark. Check out the complete set ofLenovo Vibe K4 Note Benchmarks here. It has 450MHz Mali T720-MP3 GPU. We tested some high-end games on the smartphone. Graphics was good, but the performance is not smooth in some high-end games. Overall it scored 3.5 out of 5 stars. Check out the gaming review below to know more about the gaming performance of the smartphone in detail.

Battery life

Coming to the battery life, the 3300mAh (Rated) / 3400mAh (Typical) built-in battery doesn’t offer impressive battery life. On full charge it lasts for less than a day on 4G with both the SIM cards on use. It has power saver mode that reduces the screen and GPU power consumption, but the battery life doesn’t improve much even with power saver enabled. It also has ultimate power saver mode that enables only calling and messaging for several days of standby.

It achieved One Charge rating of just 09 hours and 01 minute, which is not impressive, even though it packs a huge battery. Check out the complete set of Lenovo Vibe K4 Note battery lite test results here.

Conclusion

Overall, the Lenovo Vibe K4 Note is an impressive smartphone for the price of Rs. 11,999. It has a good display, solid build quality, brilliant audio output and a good enough camera. In addition, it also comes with dedicated dual SIM and microSD card slots, what more do you need for the price? Gaming performance could have been better and the battery life is not impressive. This might be one of the best smartphones currently, but Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Pro smartphone with a Snapdragon 650 SoC, 16MP camera and 4000mAh battery that will launch in India in coming weeks, and is expected be priced similar will likely be better than the K4 Note.

If you have a tight budget and can manage with above average battery life and don’t play high-end games with full graphics, you can easily go for the Vibe K4 Note, otherwise you can go for the Vibe P1with a huge 5000mAh battery that offers a great battery life and slightly better gaming performance.

Pros

• Good display
• Good performance
• Solid build quality
• Brilliant audio output
• 4G support with dedicated SIM and microSD slots
• Decent camera

Cons

• Average gaming performance
• Battery life could be better

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What is the Honor 7

SummarOur Sco7/10                    Page 1: Design and display                        Page 2: Software and performance                        Page 3: Camera                        Page 4: Battery, sound and conclusion                                      16 Pictures                

Pros

• Good camera
• Decent performance
• Good value for money
• Bright screen

Cons

• Below average battery
• Heavy Android skin

What is the Honor 7?

Key Features: Fingerprint scanner; 20-megapixel rear camera; Emotion UI

Manufacturer: Honor

The Honor 7 is the latest smartphone from Huawei’s spin-off company Honor. The £250 handset follows a trend set by OnePlus in that it aims to offer buyers top-end specifications and features traditionally seen on smartphones that are close to twice the price.

From purely a hardware perspective the Honor 7 achieves this goal and, despite featuring Huawei’s dire Emotion UI skin, is a solid smartphone that offers good value for money.

Honor 7 – Design

143 x 72 x 8.5mm, 157g, fingerprint scanner, nano-SIM, microSD

Honor made a big deal about the Honor 7’s design at the phone’s London launch. Specifically, the firm made a song and dance about the fact that, unlike most smartphones in the £200-£300 price category, the Honor 7 features a “sand-blasted” metal backplate.

The plate wraps around the phone’s sides and makes the Honor 7 feel more solidly built than its key rivals: the OnePlus 2 and Moto X Play.

The Honor 7’s sturdy build is aided by the phone’s Sapphire Crystal camera lens, which helps protect the sensor from scratches. However, the phone’s premium feel is slightly let down by the addition of plastic along the top and bottom edges.

From a distance it doesn't look too bad, since the plastic panels are designed to look like metal and feature a textured finish. Up close, however, they destroy the illusion that the Honor 7 is a top-end phone as they look bolted on.

To be fair to Honor, though, the design still feels reasonably premium. However, I personally prefer the look and feel of the OnePlus 2, which features metal sides and a polycarbonate, textured backplate.

I was impressed with the Honor 7’s custom smart key and rear fingerprint scanner. The smart key is a physical button on the phone’s side that can be configured to open specific applications or services when pressed.

While this may sound insignificant, I found the ability to customise the button’s function useful. For example, during a press event where I had back-to-back interviews, I was able to set the button to activate a dictaphone app.

At a basic level the Honor 7’s fingerprint scanner offers the same functionality as that of most smartphones. Sitting on the phone’s rear, it lets you set the Honor 7 to unlock or approve certain actions only once its holder has proven their identity.

However, Honor has also loaded a few extra functions onto the scanner to make it more useful. For example, once unlocked, a swipe down on the rear scanner pulls down Android’s notification, while a swipe left or right in the photo app lets you scroll through captured images.

Also welcome is the inclusion of a microSD card slot, which enables users to add a further 128GB of storage to the Honor 7’s built-in 16GB of space.

Honor 7 – Display

5.2in, IPS-NEO Full HD 1,920 x 1,080 424ppi touchscreen

The display techonology is often the first features potential smartphone buyers notice about a handset. Aware of this, the Honor 7 comes loaded with an impressive 5.2in panel. With a resolution of 1,920 x 1080, the IPS-NEO Full HD touchscreen offers a pixel density of 424ppi.

This almost puts the Honor 7 on a par with its key rival, the OnePlus 2, which features a 5.5in, 1920 x 1080, 401ppi pixel density display. However, in real-world use, I found that the Honor 7’s display performs better than most smartphones in its price range – and this includes the OnePlus 2.

The Honor 7’s screen brightness is significantly higher than any sub-£200 smartphone I’ve used, and it made the OnePlus 2 look outright dull. In fact, it was so bright that I found myself regularly having to turn off its auto setting and manually lower the brightness.

Colours, while slightly oversaturated, are also satisfying: the RGB calibration is decent, and so makes them look reasonably realistic. Contrast levels are also superb. Overall, I’m impressed with the Honor 7’s screen.

Compared to the OnePlus 2, the Honor 7's representation of white, too, is noticeably cleaner. Viewing angles are better than the OnePlus 2 as well, which is probably down to the Honor 7's inclusion of IPS-Neo technology.

IPS-Neo is a variation of the regular IPS screen technology seen on many smartphones, such as the OnePlus 2.

It aims to improve screens’ viewing angles and contrast ratio using a special form liquid crystal, which can be uniformly aligned on a display’s glass substrate. This helps to eliminates any potential unevenness in the tech’s circuit pattern that may hamper performance.

Honor 7 – Software

Android 5.0 Lollipop with Emotion UI 3.1

When Huawei created Honor, it made no secret that the move was designed to help it tailor its mobile offering to target specific segments and regions of the mobile market.

This was a big deal: although Huawei has a strong track record creating competitively priced, well-specced handsets, its history with software is a mixed bag.

Traditionally, Huawei has loaded its phones with a heavy Android skin called Emotion UI, which heavily caters to the Chinese market. The skin is generally viewed negatively and adds a number of superfluous applications.

It also radically changes the operating system’s native UI to make it look like the mongrel child of iOS and Android – key offences here include re-making the notifications menu and removing Android’s native app tray.

Emotion also adds a few odd features to Android. The worst of which are Huawei’s “Groufie” and Beauty photo modes.

On paper, the Groufie mode is actually fairly useful – it’s basically a panorama shot mode for the front camera. However, it winds no points for its name, with it sounding a little too much like “groupie” or “roofie” – a fact picked up on by many internet trolls.

The Beauty mode is a bizarre photo option that increases the size of users’ eyes and makes their skin tone flatter and paler.

Being a fairly pale Scot with blond hair, this mode resulted in turning me into Gollum from Lord of the Rings, rather than a dashing Prince Charming.

As a result, I’m a little disappointed to see the skin on the Honor 7. It makes the handset feel significantly less intuitive to use than key rivals, such as the Motorola Moto X Play – which runs a close to untouched version of Android Lollipop.

The skin will also hamper the phone’s ability to be upgraded to the final version of Android M later this year. This is because Huawei will have to rework Emotion’s code to work with the new version, something that can take months.

That said, I did notice a few useful software additions on the Honor 7, the best of which are its motion control and voice wake-up features.

The motion controls let you set the Honor 7 to do things such as flip the phone to mute it, tilt the screen to move app icons, and answer incoming calls by holding the Honor 7 next to your ear.

Voice wake-up is a particularly useful feature that lets you enact a variety of actions using spoken commands. These include such features as getting the phone to ring when you can’t find it, or phoning specific contacts simply by saying “dear” and an assigned name for the Honor 7.

I found find my lost phone feature particularly useful – although, be warned: you need to pick the Honor 7’s name carefully. On one particularly embarrassing morning when I’d overslept and couldn’t find my phone, my flatmate was woken up to frenzied cries of “dear [expletive deleted]” – which he didn’t appreciate.

Honor 7 – Performance

2.2GHz, octa-core, 64-bit, HiSilicon Kirin 935 CPU, Mali-T628MP4 GPU

The Honor 7 comes loaded with Huawei’s octa-core, 64-bit, HiSilicon Kirin 935 CPU, a Mali-T628MP4 GPU and 3GB of RAM.

For the price, the Honor 7’s specifications are pretty impressive. By comparison the OnePlus 2 features a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 CPU, Adreno 430 GPU and either 3GB or 4GB of RAM.

Running the Honor 7 through our standard set of benchmark tests, the phone performed admirably. On Geekbench the Honor 7 ran in with a reasonable 3,569 multi-core score.

Interestingly, in 3DMark’s gaming-focused Ice Storm Unlimited test the Honor 7 scored only 12,331.

By comparison, the 3GB OnePlus 2 scored 4,460 on Geekbench and 22,549 in 3DMark. A lower GPU test score is a regular issue with most Huawei phones. In real-world use, however, I found the Honor 7 offers decent performance.

Running on 4G and Wi-Fi, web pages opened in milliseconds and video streamed seamlessly. The Honor 7 also proved capable of running 3D games: the likes of Grand Theft Auto 3, Dead Space and The Bard’s Tale chug along stutter free.

That said, the phone displays a tendency to heat up and slightly throttle performance when faced with ongoing demanding tasks. This became evident when I tried to stream a couple of two-hour movies on Netflix.

However, this is an issue I see on the majority of smartphones. On the whole, and for the money, the Honor 7's performance is excellent.

Honor 7 – Camera

Rear: 20-megapixel, 5,152 x 3,888 resolution, with dual-LED flash and Sapphire Lens. Front: 8-megapixel, 3,264 x 2448 resolution

Camera technology is an increasingly competitive area in the smartphone industry. Motorola set the standard for affordable smartphones earlier this year when it released its stellar third-generation Moto G.

Featuring similar specifications to the Nexus 6, which costs close to three times as much, the Moto G (2015) is one of the best affordable camera-phones on the market.

The OnePlus 2 also boasts pretty impressive camera specs for its price, loaded with a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front option.

Aware of it’s stiff competition, the Honor 7 comes with an impressive 20-megapixel rear camera and a 8-megapixel front-facing unit. In a bid to further improve the Honor 7’s photo-taking ability, Honor has also included a custom camera app, which adds a variety of new shot modes, controls and filters.

I was impressed with the Honor 7’s performance when shooting with the camera set to auto. Honor claims the rear camera boasts focus speeds of 0.1 seconds, and having thoroughly tested the Honor 7, I can say this is true.

The camera features Sonic the Hedgehog-level shutter and autofocus speeds. Images caught in the automatic mode universally looked crisp, displayed decent contrast and colour balance levels and were more than good enough for sharing on social media.

From a techinical perspective, there's one negative to the Honor 7’s camera: the lack of optical image stabilsation (OIS). This is one key bit of tech that its rival, the OnePlus 2, has seen fit to include. OIS improves a camera’s low-light performance by compensating for and reducing the impact of minor hand movements, or vibrations.

Running the two head to head, I found shots taken on the Honor 7 in regular light featured slightly more realistic colours. The OnePlus 2's camera performed better in low light, however.

Taken on the Honor 7

Taken on the OnePlus 2

The Honor 7 also offers an impressive number of preset modes. While some, such as the Beauty mode mentioned earlier and “good food” – yes, you read that right: the Honor 7 has a camera mode specifically for photographing your dinner – are fairly useless, others are pretty cool.

One of the best is the camera’s light-painting mode. Light painting is a custom feature designed to create artistic shots in specific low-light conditions. These include “car light trails”, “light graffiti”, “silky water” and “star track” settings.

The settings instruct the camera to continue shooting until the user manually stops and create artistic photos that track and display moving light. The resulting effects look similar to an extended exposure photo shot taken with a DSLR.

While the feature sounds gimmicky, I found it entertaining to use and was fairly pleased with the shots I could create using it.

My only issue with the Honor 7 camera is the software's terrible UI, which hides a number of useful features.

For example, while the camera offers manual controls for key features, such as ISO, white balance, exposure, saturation, contrast and brightness, they’re hidden away in sub-menus.

Accessing them requires you to click through multiple menu screens, which is time-consuming and clunky. These features would be better included as a pull-out menu in the main camera UI – as seen in the LG G4’s camera app.

Honor 7 – Battery

Non-removable 3,100mAh battery with fast charging

Battery life is another key issue hampering the Honor 7’s overall performance. In a test where we looped a 720p video with the Wi-Fi turned off and the screen brightness set to 75%, the Honor 7 lasted an average of seven to eight hours.

This puts it below most other handsets, which generally lasted between eight and nine in the same test.

In real-world use, the lower than average burn rate was evident. Honor claims the battery will last at least two days from a single charge. Using the Honor 7 as my main phone, it never once lived up to this claim.

In regular use the Honor 7 lasted between a day and a day and a half off one charge.

Regular use entailed listening to music on the way to and from work, checking email and social media feeds, sporadically browsing the web, making and taking a few calls and playing a few levels of a Warhammer Quest.

With more intensive use, however, the Honor 7’s battery can be defeated in a matter of hours. Steaming Netflix videos with the Wi-Fi turned on and the screen brightness set to auto, the Honor 7 struggled to last more than four hours.

Gaming sessions also put a serious drain on the battery – playing games such as The Banner Saga, Shadowrun and Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition resulted in the Honor 7 losing between 20-to-30% of its charge per hour.

On the flip side, the Honor 7 does feature fast charging and a power saver. Fast charging means the Honor 7’s battery can be topped up in less than an hour – with the right cable.

The power saver is a useful feature that lets you control which applications are consuming power and manage items such as the CPU’s performance to save battery – similar to the way you can on a Windows PC. This will enable you to extend the Honor 7’s battery life – but by reducing performance.

Honor 7 – Sound and Call Quality

The Honor 7’s speaker is on a par with most smartphones. It has a reasonable maximum volume, but sounds slightly tinny and features a fairly weak low end. Cranked to its maximum volume the speaker also begins to distort slightly.

All-in-all this means that, like most smartphones, the speaker is good enough for watching TV on Netflix and for gaming, but it isn't great for playing music.

However, call quality was impressive. Taking and making calls in busy coffee shops, loud London streets and busy bars, weren't an issue at all – they remained audible and the microphone proved powerful to ensure people on the other end of the line could hear me.

Should I buy an Honor 7?

The Honor 7 is a well-built smartphone that offers great value for money. However, its heavy Android skin and lower than average battery life diminish its overall appeal.

While it will meet most buyers’ needs, people interested in a great-value smartphone would do well to consider the OnePlus 2 – which targets the same market, has a better design and offers superior performance and battery life.

Verdict

The Honor 7 is a great-value smartphone, but it's let down by poor software.