Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus first impressions: Heats up competition

NEW DELHI: Lenovo stunned everybody with the launch of its Vibe K5 Plus smartphone today at a very competitive price. The smartphone comes with a metal body design at a price of Rs 8,499. Apart from a good design, it also packs some decent specifications. We spent some time with the device and here are its first impressions.

Design

The Lenovo Vibe K5 plus flaunts a metal body design, which gives a premium look to the device. The handset has a very ergonomic design with round edges that make it comfortable to hold and use with one hand. The volume rocker and power buttons are placed on the right side of the panel, while the charging port and audio jack is located at the top. The sim card and microSD slots are covered with the removable back panel. The front of the device consists of three soft keys and a 5MP selfie camera. On the other side, the rear of the smartphone houses a 16MP camera with LED flash and dual loud speakers. All-in-all it is a nice looking smartphone in the budget price segment.

Display

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus features a 5-inch full HD display with 1,080x1,920 pixels resolution. The display offers sharp colour reproduction and good visibility under the sun. Along with this, it also gives wide viewing angles that will provide good gaming experience to the users. The display is vibrant enough with no pixilation.


Hardware

The Lenovo Vibe K5 is powered by a 1.7GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 processor paired with 2GB of RAM. The internal storage of the device accounts to 16GB, which can be expanded further up to 128GB using a microSD card. We used the device for quite some time and did not face any problems with it. The handset packs a 2,750 mAh removable battery too. This we feel could be the deciding factor as many smartphones in the class come with larger batteries. The company has also incorporated dual stereo speaker design powered by Dolby Atmos for better audio experience.

Software

The Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop operating system. The interface is pretty clean and user-friendly. However, there is no app drawer and the home screen is cluttered with various apps. The handset also has OTG support, which will be liked by many users out there.


Camera

As far as image capabilities are concerned, Lenovo Vibe K5 comes equipped with a 13MP rear camera with LED flash and a 5MP front facing snapper for clicking selfies. We used the camera in bright daylight and it produced good and sharp images. The selfie camera was also fine, but some noise was clearly visible in selfies when shot indoors. The camera app is clean and offers various photography modes to the users, just like other Lenovo smartphones.

What we think

Looking at the current competition in the Indian smartphone market Lenovo has fiercely priced its Vibe K5 Plus mobile. It offers a metal design, which is hard to find in this price segment. We will be reviewing the Lenovo Vibe K5 soon, so do look for it in the coming weeks at TOI Tech.