Lenovo Vibe P1

The Vibe P1 sports a 5.5-inch display with a generous full HD resolution, resulting in a pixel density of 401ppi. While the screen is sharp enough, it wasn’t as responsive as we would have liked, with scrolls and swipes often going unregistered. Another issue with the display is the auto brightness, which is very glitchy. In most situations, the brightness was too low to be usable, and had to be increased manually. Sunlight legibility is very poor too, unlike the Vibe S1.

The Vibe P1 runs Lenovo’s custom Vibe UI that’s based on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop. We’ve already spoken about Vibe UI at length in our previous Lenovo smartphone reviews, but one feature that does stand out on the Vibe P1 is the presence of an app drawer. Traditionally, Vibe UI doesn't feature an app drawer, so it’s a refreshing change. In the homescreen settings, there's an option to enable the default Vibe UI launcher if you prefer. The Vibe P1 comes with the usual set of Lenovo apps including Theme Center, SYNCit and SHAREit. There’s also quite a bit of pre-loaded content, including WPS Office, WeChat, UCBrowser, Truecaller, Tap the Frog HD, Skype, Myntra, Flipkart and Guvera Music. Fortunately, all this bloatware can be uninstalled.

The Vibe P1 sports a 13MP rear camera with phase-detection autofocus and dual-tone LED flash, as well as a 5MP front camera. The camera app is quite straightforward, and comes with the usual features like HDR, panorama and manual controls like ISO, white balance and metering. You’ll also find an extra called Effects, which is essentially a range of filters and special effects you can apply in real time.

Powering the Vibe P1 is an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor with four Cortex A-53 cores clocked at 1.5GHz, and another four spinning at 1.0GHz. The chipset is paired with 2GB of RAM. The phone could handle most apps we threw at it and multi-tasked fine, although we had more than once instance where the smartphone froze completely and required a reboot. Handling gaming on the Vibe P1 is an Adreno 405 processor, and we tested the smartphone’s gaming prowess by playing intensive titles like Dead Trigger 2. We didn’t encounter any freezes or frame drops, although there were noticeable lags, especially while navigating. Overheating wasn't an issue though, with the Vibe P1 remaining at a comfortable temperature after even a 30-minute session.

The highlight of the Vibe P1 is undoubtedly its battery, and this is one area where it doesn’t disappoint. The smartphone easily lasts a day and a half with heavy usage, and with moderate use we were able to eke out two full day’s worth. In our video loop battery drain test, we got a result of 22 hours and 8 minutes, which is a really good result, but not as good as the Gionee Marathon M4 (review), which lasted for over 26 hours in the same test. Large batteries are a pain to charge, and to make up for this, Lenovo has endowed the Vibe P1 with its Rocket Charge tech, which charges the phone at 24W. We managed to charge the handset from 20 percent to 60 percent in around 40 minutes, and a full charge from 0 to 100 percent took a little over 90 minutes. Fast charging is a welcome addition on any device, but for smartphones with big batteries, it makes a huge difference. We liked that Lenovo has bundled the Rocket charger with the device, which means no extra purchases.