OS, UI and Everyday Use

Lenovo got a lot of flak for its Android skins in the past, and much of it was justified. The company has a habit of slapping on a lot of bloatware and heavy skins on its Android phones, and that’s something most enthusiasts don’t like.

This time around things aren’t nearly as bad, although there is still room for improvement. The latest incarnation of Vibe UI still offers a heavily customised Android experience, but it’s based on Android 5.0, and has a lot of nifty features as well. It could still do with a bit less bloat, but it’s not bad.

The Lenovo K3 Note also supports a number of useful gestures. You can unlock the phone with a swipe from the lock screen, you can launch the camera and so on. Gesture support is relatively reliable and faster than on your average budget phone.

Lenovo did a great job at optimising the launcher, so everything is smooth as silk. The phone feels very responsive no matter what you do with it, from gestures and the lock screen, to very demanding apps. There are a few nuisances, though. The preinstalled browser just isn’t good enough, especially not with Chrome just begging to be installed. We could not get the theme manager to work, either. Eventually it fired up and we managed to play around with some themes. We found a few original Lenovo themes and we can report they look good.

Although we are fans of stock Android, we don’t mind well thought through custom designs either. Lenovo didn’t exactly have these in the past, but with its latest Android 5.0 phones, it has made a giant leap forward. Things could still be better, because Vibe UI tries to emulate iOS a bit too much for our liking (squared icons, lack of app drawer and so on). However, this is quite common in Asia, and most major Asian smartphone manufacturer, save for Sony, Samsung and HTC, do the exact same thing.

The really good news is that the Lenovo K3 Note is very smooth in everyday operations and the launcher feels polished. It’s clearly well optimised, which has another positive side effect – battery life is quite good.

The battery itself is very thin for a 3000mAh unit, but it’s got a big footprint. The angled design allowed Lenovo to use a tall and wide battery that’s about 4mm thin. Even with a Full HD display, the MT6752 processor doesn’t have to break a sweat in most applications (except games, obviously). Lenovo’s optimisations seem to work quite well, so we got more than two days of moderate use out of the handset (without data). The big, high-res screen doesn’t appear to make much of a difference. If you are careful, you should get up to two days even with mobile data and moderate use.

Now for some bad news - a full charge takes quite a while. We are not sure whether this has something to do with the charger included with our particular unit, which is rated at 2000mAh, but doesn't appear to deliver that much.

The ergonomics are ok and there is almost nothing to complain about. Obviously, 5.5-inch phones aren’t for everyone, but as far as phablets go, we’ve seen worse. The matte back cover offers a fair amount of grip. It’s not that easy to remove, but once you get the hang of it, it’s straightforward. A tiny cut-out near the microphone allows you to pull it off, provided you have thin fingernails.

In terms of ergonomics, our biggest complaint is the lack of backlighting on the capacitive navigation buttons. While most people get used to the layout in no time, we feel it’s still a good idea to have some sort of light behind them. The phone also features a notification LED at the top, which helps. Speaking of LEDs, the dual-LED flash is quite powerful, and while it doesn’t do wonders for night photography, it makes for a good flashlight.

The GPS offers good accuracy and this is what we got in our office. It does take a while to get a first lock, but once it does, it works well.

Oh wait, we forgot the phone part of the review. The dialer is customised, but it’s good. The really good news is that audio quality is excellent, thanks to the noise cancelling microphone and a few proprietary technologies employed in the device. No complaints here.