Lenovo P2 64GB

Since the 5,100mAh battery inside the Lenovo P2 is its calling card, we’ve decided to talk about it first. Getting directly down to the ‘brass tacks’ - the battery life on the Lenovo P2 is phenomenal. We got almost three days of battery life on moderate usage, and on heavy usage the battery easily lasted us two days; in short, the battery would just refuse to quit. In fact, during our stress test, we managed to squeeze in close to five hours of gaming, an hour worth of phone calls, two hours of social media and messaging, and even an hour of reverse charging. You can be rest assured that you won’t need to charge the phone more than thrice a week.

The challenge for brands making smartphones with large batteries is to ensure that it doesn’t become bulky. This was a problem with Lenovo’s previous Vibe P1, which was tough to use with one hand. That said, Lenovo has managed to surpass our expectations with the P2. While the P2 is your regular candybar phone with a utilitarian design, it is fairly compact and ergonomically-speaking great to hold in the hand. In all honestly, the Lenovo P2’s fit and finish is as good as the OnePlus 3 (review) if not better. The Graphite Gray variant looks stealthy and the edges are also neatly chamfered. However, the Gold variant has an ugly looking black trim around the display. The 177g weight of the phone is evenly distributed across the body of the phone, which ensures that the phone fits snugly in your palm without feeling top or bottom heavy. Using the phone with one hand shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

With the launch of the K6 Power, Lenovo decided to do away with Vibe UI and stick to an implementation of Android Marshmallow that looks quite like stock Android. From the multitasking carousel to the app drawer, the design looks familiar. On boot up, you will find third-party apps like Flipkart, Evernote, Lenovo Companion, SHAREit, Truecaller, and UC Browser sitting in the app drawer. Thankfully, all these apps can be uninstalled.

The Lenovo P2 has a 13MP rear camera with phase detection autofocus (PDAF) and single LED flash. This camera can also shoot 4K videos. The front camera can capture 5MP images but it only offers a fixed focus.

The use of Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC coupled with 4GB of RAM on our review unit (there's a lower variant that offers 3GB of RAM as well) ensures that you mostly get smooth performance across the board. That said, there were a few hiccups here and there, and sometimes the entire phone would hang randomly too. Obviously, this breaks the experience of using the phone but we are pretty sure this issue can be sorted with a simple software update. Most games run fine, including the ones with heavy graphics. We managed to play games like Dead Trigger 2 and Asphalt 8 without any lag as such but load times were longer than we expected. Thankfully, the phone doesn't heat up at all. All in all, the Lenovo P2 isn’t as smooth and refined as the Moto Z Play (review) but it is not entirely bad either; it gets the job done and then some. Do note that our phone came with 32GB internal storage, of which around 8GB was taken up by the operating system. 

At a starting price of Rs 16,999 for the 3GB RAM variant, the P2 is tempting and the fact that it can last three days on a single charge will definitely grab the attention of most of our readers. But like we said at the start of the review, does the P2 manage to subvert the popular notion that phones with large batteries are bad performers otherwise? Well, not entirely but it does come really close. If only the P2 had a good, if not great, camera and offered a completely stable performance, we’d have been convinced that this is the phone to buy under Rs 20,000. Period.