Lenovo A6000 Plus

Comparing the A6000 Plus to the A6000, you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart. While the innards have been slightly modified, Lenovo hasn’t tampered with the build and design. The A6000 Plus is a compact device, measuring 8.2mm around the waist and weighing in at just 128g. Thanks to its 5-inch display, it’s very comfortable for one-handed use. The laminated front panel features the front camera, earpiece, Lenovo branding and sensors above the screen. Underneath the display are located a trio of Android capacitive keys, but these aren’t backlit, and are difficult to discern outdoors.

The 5-inch screen of the A6000 Plus features a resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels, which equates to a pixel density of 294ppi. It’s got good brightness levels and decent viewing angles. Text and icons look sharp and colours are vivid, making watching videos and playing games a visual treat. The screen is legibile in sunlight, but it isn’t the best we’ve seen. Unfortunately, the display misses out on any sort of protective coating. Gorilla or Dragontrail Glass are now pretty much the norm among budget smartphones, so it's surprising that Lenovo chose to exclude this basic feature.

In charge of the A6000 Plus’ photography department is an 8MP autofocus primary camera and 2MP fixed-focus secondary camera. The camera app is a simple, no-frills affair. Opening it up in landscape mode, you’ll see the shutter button on the right side, the shortcut to the gallery above it, and another button below which lets you switch between Auto, Video and Panorama mode.

The A6000 Plus runs Android 4.4.4 KitKat as a base, overlaid with Lenovo’s proprietary user interface, Vibe UI 2.0. By now, we’ve become accustomed to custom UI’s from Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi, Honor, vivo, meizu and Gionee. They all follow a similar core philosophy, skipping the app drawer and usually opting for colourful designs and theme stores.

Powering the A6000 Plus is a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor clocked at 1.2GHz, assisted by 2GB of RAM. In our day-to-day usage, the smartphone worked well enough, with no lags or delays while opening apps. We did notice an occassional app close or two, but nothing that left us overly concerned. 720p and 1080p videos play smoothly, and the stereo speakers are loud and clear enough not to require headphones. There's a dedicated Dolby app where you can switch the audio settings between movie, music, game or voice, or create custom presets.