Lenovo S920 In Depth Review: Punchy Performer, Stunning Entertainer

User Interface And Apps

While most manufacturers are supplying handsets with older versions of Android, this device comes loaded with Jelly Bean 4.2.1. One of our favorite aspects of the Lenovo S920 happens to be its UI. While most other manufacturers cram bloated homemade apps and custom themes down your throat, Lenovo has done something completely different. If you like keeping things simple and elegant, then you'll love the S920's UI. Lenovo has mostly used vanilla Android, along with changes to a few things here and there. After all, real style has to be simple.

The device comes pre-loaded with a version of Norton Mobile Security and also Lenovo's own wonderful little app that prolongs battery life. Everything else can be downloaded off the Play Store.

Calls

Call performance was good and we achieved decent clarity on both ends thanks to phablet's strong signal reception. As we mentioned earlier, the S920 has a single loudspeaker located at the back. Flip the phablet over and you can use it for loud-speaker calls, however we noted that audio quality was bad in the position.

Camera

As with most smartphablets in the price range, the S920 comes with two cameras, an 8MP shooter in the rear and a 2MP shooter in the front. We used to rear cam to take dozens of pictures in different lighting conditions and even though the results weren't great, but good enough. We zoomed into the pictures to find very little noise.

We liked some of the filters, settings and especially the Face Beauty mode. Despite having the latest version of Android, the phablet doesn't come with spherical camera mode. You'll find the usual set of features like grid lines, self-timer, scene modes, white balance options, GPS location info, a nice crisp shutter sound and settings that allow you to choose higher quality outputs.

Moving onto the front cam, we used it mainly for video chats. Video quality was good over Google Hangouts and the camera proved to be perfect for the purpose. It is worth noting that while the S920 doesn't have the best imaging in its price bracket, its results are rather good.

Performance

For its processing needs, the phablet calls upon a MTK 6589 1.2GHz quadcore processor. Along with 1GB of RAM, the device is capable of a good amount of multi-tasking. Even when dealing with graphic intensive games and apps, the device managed to run everything smoothly. Our benchmark tests on AnTuTu gave the phablet a score of 12,896, ranking it above the Samsung Galaxy Note and even the Nexus 7.