Lenovo Vibe Shot

The Vibe Shot features a 5-inch display with full HD resolution, resulting in a pixel density of 441ppi. The closely-packed pixels ensure icons, images and videos look crisp, with no jagged edges visible in text even when you zoom in. Colours are balanced, and viewing angles are good too, thanks to the IPS display. Sunlight legibility, unfortunately, is poor. We also found that the auto brightness was a tad too low for our liking, with no option to fine-tune it in auto mode. The display was smooth and responsive in our experience, and comes with a glove mode for extra sensitivity. Corning Gorilla Glass 3 provides protection from minor knocks.

The Vibe Shot runs Android 5.1.1 layered with Lenovo’s Vibe UI. We’ve talked a great deal about Vibe UI in our previous Lenovo reviews, and for an idea of what you get on the Lollipop-based Vibe UI you can refer to our K3 Note review. To recap on the basics though, Vibe UI draws on several stock Android features, including the lockscreen notifications, the notification bar, quick settings menu and multi-tasking pane, but adds in lots of colour and pre-loaded apps. It lacks an app drawer and comes with a Theme Center from where you can install one of six themes, as well as modify other design elements. Lenovo’s SYNCit and SHAREit apps are also pre-loaded, as well as a ton of bloatware, including Skype, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook, Evernote, UC Browser, Guvera Music, WPS Office, Truecaller and Tap the Frog HD, among others.

The Vibe Shot's cameras are undoubtedly the stars of the show. The primary camera is a 16MP OIS unit with a 6-element lens, BSI sensor and f/2.2 aperture. It's complimented by a tricolour LED flash and an infrared autofocus sensor which Lenovo claims is two times faster than regular autofocus. The front camera is an 8MP fixed-focus unit. The camera app features two primary modes. There's a choice between Auto mode and Pro mode, and you can switch between them using the physical toggle on the right spine. In auto mode, you get a very simple UI with the shutter button, video button and gallery shorcut on one side, and settings and front camera toggle on the other. The viewfinder takes up the rest of the space, with just a flash control and a Smart tool. The Smart tool basically auto-selects the scene mode best suited to the shooting condition. There's also a Smart Composition tool in settings, which if turned on, prompts you on how to better compose your frame to get a good shot. 

The Vibe Shot is powered by the Snapdragon 615 processor, consisting of two quad-core Cortex A-53 clusters clocked at 1.7GHz and 1.0GHz respectively. There’s an Adreno 405 GPU for graphics, and a generous 3GB of RAM – the same configuration we saw on the OPPO R7 Plus (review). We used the Vibe Shot as our primary smartphone for over a week, and the performance was stable, even with 10-15 apps lurking in the background. There are noticeable lags in opening some apps though, and ironically, the camera app is one of them. It takes a good 3-4 seconds to open, and longer if you want to start it by pressing the physical shutter button. To test the gaming performance of the smartphone, we spent some time playing intensive titles like Dead Trigger 2. The game did crash once or twice during our usage, but graphics rendering was otherwise smooth, with no noticeable freezes or frame drops. We also noticed that the phone didn’t heat up even after 30 minutes of continuous gameplay, although it did get slightly warm.