Lenovo K3 Note

The Chinese manufacturer seems to be a big believer of “don’t fix if it ain’t broke” when it comes to the design ethos of its devices. Perhaps that’s why Lenovo has opted for a similar design for its recent launches. The Lenovo K3 Note seems to be exactly the same as the A7000 (first impressions), which in turn is remarkably similar to its smaller sibling, the Lenovo A6000 (first impressions).

The display is the trump card of the Lenovo K3 Note. At a time when most smartphones in its segment offer HD displays, the smartphone's screen offers full HD resolution. Not just that, the device also offers a large screen real estate of 5.5-inches. With such a big OGS IPS display at your disposal, watching movies, reading eBooks or playing games on the phone is a delightful experience. Colours pop out on the screen quite well and it’s also sharp since it bears a pixel density of 401ppi. The display also offers wide viewing angles and doesn’t show any glare even when you shift your angle.

The Lenovo K3 Note runs the latest build of Android, which is v5.0 Lollipop and it’s topped by the manufacturer’s custom skin dubbed Vibe UI. If you want a short description of the software aspect of the phablet, we can tell you that the UI is similar to most offerings from various Chinese brands, be it in terms of looks or the options to customise and personalise the phone.

For imagery, the Lenovo K3 Note flaunts a 13-megapixel snapper at the back, which has become standard in this segment. The primary camera has an aperture of f/2.0, and comes with usual features such as autofocus, touch-to-focus, face detection, etc. It’s supplemented by a dual-LED flash to assist shooting in dimly-lit environments.

Even with its budget pricing, the Lenovo K3 Note boasts of serious firepower under the hood. It comes equipped with MediaTek’s MT6752 CPU, which offers eight Cortex-A53 cores ticking at 1.7GHz. The processor is 64-bit capable and combined with Android 5.0’s support for this future-proof architecture, the processor zips through any tasks thrown at it. 2GB of RAM complements the chipset and allows you to run multiple apps together smoothly. A Mali-T760 MP2 graphics processor is there to take care of the graphics. While we don’t have any complaints in terms of basic performance or playing casual games, we found noticeable stutter while playing high-end titles such as Asphalt 8 or Leo’s Fortune. It seems that the 1080p resolution of the phone takes a toll on the GPU.

In terms of pure numbers, the 2,900mAh battery powering the Lenovo K3 Note seems pretty capable, and better than the competition. However, the same can’t be said about its real-life performance. Sure, it can give you a company for an entire working day, but by night, you’ll need to hunt for the charger. Juiced up at 100 percent at 8:00 am, the device was down to 8 percent by 11:00 pm with the use of half an hour of calls, use of 3G / 4G for almost the whole time, navigation for a few minutes and playing games for 10 to 15 minutes.