FIRST IMPRESSIONS | The Lenovo A7000
Reviews May 14, 2015 Jason Dayrit 0
We take a look at Lenovo’s latest offering: a decently-priced multimedia smartphone that packs a punch.
We were fortunate enough to be able to get the Lenovo A7000 early and out of the box, it’s already a looker. The phone’s back is plastic, which gives it less heft than other smartphones within its size range but doesn’t really feel cheap at all. This whole plastic thing seems to be shaping up as a Lenovo trademark of sorts, which isn’t such a bad thing at all. Despite the lighter weight and plastic material, the A7000 can take a tumble in your pocket or backpack without complaint.
The display is a 5.5-inch IPS LCD affair with a 1280 x 720 resolution clocking in at 267 ppi. As with most Lenovo smartphones, the display is vibrant with saturation at a sufficient level. Everything is crisp and sharp, with decent viewing angles. One thing we really liked on the A7000 is that it comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop out of the box, which makes navigation snappy. Lenovo has overlaid its Vibe UI 3.0 skin over the Android OS, which does away with the app drawer. Fiddling around with the device was easy enough, if you’re a fan of using folders to group your apps (which we think is really the way to go; app drawer or no).
The basic navigation buttons are separate from the screen, an indication that Lenovo won’t be integrating them on a single display any time soon. On the side of the handset are the power button and volume rocker, while the micro USB charging port and audio jack are located up top. The speaker is near the middle right side of the phone, while at the top left corner sits the 8MP rear camera with dual LED flash.
The A7000 runs a MediaTek MT6752 4G LTE 1.5GHz True8Core processor paired with an ARM Mali 760 GPU. Those, together with 2GB of RAM, is enough to run graphic-intensive games like Asphalt 8 smoothly without dropping pixels. Marketed as a multi-media phone, the A7000’s hardware seems to tick all the boxes, and we’ll have more on this in our in-depth review.
The Lenovo A7000 has a removable 2,900 mAh battery that’s reported to last up to 16 hours on 3G talk time. We’ll have to test it with 4G, which the device supports. Rounding out the specs are two SIM slots, one capable of handling LTE. It also has a microSD slot up to 32GB, and is OTG-ready. The memory options will come in handy, considering the phone has only 8GB worth of memory and the UI takes up a surprising chunk of it: 5GB.
The A7000 is the first smartphone to feature Dolby Atmos audio support. If you’re the type of person who prefers headphones to in-ear monitors when watching movies or playing games on a smartphone to get the best surround sound experience, then the A7000 might be for you and will be explored in the in-depth review.
We took a couple of test shots with the rear camera and those turned up well enough. The camera view offers a decent amount of controls for your shots, which is great especially if the Auto function isn’t working well enough for the shot you want. The photo above shows how bright the phone can be under a white LED light source and the photo below shows how much the phone can compensate when the light source (another white LED bulb) is far from the subject.
When it comes to specs-to-price, the Lenovo A7000 can play with the best of them. At P 7,390, the phone is at a sweet spot for what your wallet can handle versus what it can give you. Best of all, you won’t need to get out of the house to buy one, as Lenovo has partnered with Lazada to have the A7000 available for online purchase. At the price mentioned, you not only get the handset, but it also comes with a free back cover and screen protector. The phone goes up on the site at 12NN on May 21.
Jason Dayrit
Jason is a gadget junkie, a gear head, and an aspiring Internet Supervillain. He is also the EIC of twenty8two.com.
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