Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus [First Impressions]: 7 Things to know before you buy this phone

By Harshita
|

Lenovo's new budget warrior named the Vibe K5 Plus is hitting the smartphone market in India on March 23rd, when it goes on sale exclusively on Flipkart. Knowing that the competition is severe in the budget segment, in particular, the company kept the price of the K5 Plus phone surprisingly low at Rs 8,499.

 

Rating:
3.0/5

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus First Impressions

By launching its new phone at this price, the company seems to have hit the right cord considering that its rivals like Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and LeEco Le 1S among others pack in powerful specs and are priced aggressively.

 

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus packs in quite an interesting set of specifications that would set users back a small amount of money. Another key thing is that unlike many of rival smartphones, the K5 Plus will be selling in an open sale instead of flash sale model. The company mentioned that the decision of choosing to sell this phone in an open sale models has been made because it doesn't want its consumers to feel disappointed on not being able to buy the phone in the limited period flash sale scenario.

We were there at the launch event of the Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus phone held in Delhi, and got to check the phone for a brief duration. Here we give our first impressions in the form of seven key things to known about the Lenovo's new budget offering before you invest in the phone.

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus First Impressions

Design: Light and comfortable on hand

The Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus is a smartphone that is not exactly gorgeous but it is still good looking for a budget smartphone. It is made predominantly of plastic with a look and texture that blends well with the rest of its body that is made of metal. The phone is pretty light on hand, weighing in at 142grams, and is comfortable to be used single handedly. The back panel is smooth and the curves on sides result in good grip on hand. Another advantage is that the back panel of the phone comes off and you can remove the battery as well. However, the phone doesn't feel sturdy and may get bumps and damaged easily on falling against hard surface.

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus First Impressions

Display: Vibrant and Crisp
The Vibe K5 Plus dons a 5-inch IPS display with FHD resolution offering 1920x1080pixels, and a peak brightness of 450nits. It looks crisp, reproduces colours well, and offers good viewing angles but is not the best out there. We are yet to test it under bright sun light to know whether the 450nits helps in visibility.

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus First Impressions

Hardware: Octa-core chipset with 2GB of RAM
The Vibe K5 Plus boasts a Snapdragon 616 octa-core chipset (four Cortex A53 @1.2GHz each, and four Cortex A53 cores @1.5GHz) with 64-bit processing, supported by an Adreno 405 GPU. The chipset is paired with 2GB of RAM and 16 of internal storage, which is not the best combination of storage capacity in this price range, but it seems promising. Considering that the 3GB RAM has now become kind of a standard for smartphones in this price range, we feel higher RAM would have only been an advantage for this phone.

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus First Impressions

Camera: Good to go!
The Vibe K5 smartphone features a 13MP rear camera with autofocus and LED flash. On our brief hands on experience, we found the rear camera nice. The images it clicked were sharp and focused right. The 5MP fixed-focus front-facing snapper was just about fine, with nothing great about it. Both the cameras can shoot videos at 1080p. The camera on this phone seems nice, but we will reserve our final take on the imaging capabilities for our review of the phone.

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus First Impressions

Better Audio quality, courtesy Dolby Atmos
The phone features Dolby Atmos surround sound, and it does help in enhancing audio experience as we noticed the difference in audio quality even during the brief hands on time with the K5 Plus phone. Though, we will reserve our final take on it for our review of the phone.

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus First Impressions

Software: Neat and light
The phone runs Android 5.1 Lollipop software with Lenovo skin on top, which has now become standard to the phones in this price range. However, the company could have made a difference by introducing this phone running Android's 6.0 Marshmallow iteration. The skin on the Android is neat and is fairly light.

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus First Impressions

Connectivity: Dual 4G SIMs
In terms of connectivity, the Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus offers 4G LTE support with dual SIMs, which is an advantage of the phone. Also, it supports other standard connectivity options like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and more.

Conclusion:

The Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus makes for a good budget smartphone for its price of Rs 8,499, however, it is cleary not the best in this segment. The phone lacks a fingerprint scanner and USB Type C connectivity port which are present on its competitors like LeEco Le 1S that is priced close to Rs 10,000 in India. Ultimately, the K5 Plus' performance will decide whether it will do well in the market or fail to make any dent.

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