Lenovo A6000 Review: A Great Phone

Lenovo has launched A6000, a good phone, only sold by the online vendor Flipkart to the pre-registered buyers. The new strategy of selling limited number of handsets to only pre-registered buyers via an online shopping website was brought in India by Xiaomi. The did it successfully with their MI series. After Xiaomi, Micromax followed the same tactics with its Yu Yureka. It is being sold on Amazon India. Lenovo A6000 is in direct competition of these two phone makers. Now, the fight is between A6000, Yu Yureka and Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G.

Lenovo has made a good position among the Indian smartphone buyers. It has many popular phones like Vibe X2, A269i, S660 etc. Is this new phone A6000, the most affordable 4G LTE mobile phone in India, is fit to defeat its competitors?

First impression is known to form an opinion about anything even before valuing it fully. So, what we thought about this Lenovo A6000 when we first saw it?

The phone came with a nowadays standard small square paper box popularized by iPhone. In the box there is a compact wall charger. It is of 1000 milliampere capacity. There is a standard USB cable to connect the phone with the charger. There is a free screenguard for you. We think such small gifts will make the buyers happy. But the headphone supplied with the handset could be better. It is of cheap quality. There are some papers in the box too like product info, warranty card and a user guide.

After opening the box we looked at the phone. Lenovo A6000 looked like a premium device. It sports a 5 inches screen but it is comfortable to hold. The dimensions of the phone are 71 x141 x8.2. It is pretty slim at 8.2mm. Compare it with your old Nokia Symbians guys.

The handset is lightweight. It only weighs 128 gm. It feels quiet sturdy in hand. The good thing about the design of the phone is the matte finish of the rear panel. It will not attract finger prints and it will enhance the fall protection of the phone. There is the rear camera on the top left corner. A small LED flash can be seen just below it.

The power button is in the right side of the phone as well as the volume rocker. There are two input output jacks- the standard USB point and the 3.5 mm audio output jack. These are on the top side of the phone. And oh! You will surely notice two speaker grills at the bottom side of the back panel. Overall, the 1^st impression of Lenovo A6000 sets our hopes high that it would be great device.

Yu Yureka and Redmi Note 4G both sport a 5.5 inches display but Lenovo A6000 is contended with a 5 inches LCD screen. The display resolution is 1280x720, i.e. HD display. The pixel density is 294 PPI. How good is 294 PPI? Well, can you remember good old N73 of Nokia? It had only 167 PPI pixel -density. GSMArena wrote about the display density of N73 on its review of N73 :” Resolution is fine; its pixels are only visible through the macro eye of a standard camera. The human eye is not so perfect...”. So, you can see that 294 is a pretty high pixel density for human eye to detect.

The color reproduction of the display is very good. It also supports wide viewing angles. The sunlight legibility is not bad. The display is multi-touch with 5 point support.

The Accelerometer controls the display orientation and it suffers no lag. There is a proximity sensor which shuts the display off if you bring the phone to your ear during a call.

Lenovo A6000 is a dual SIM supported mobile phone. There are two SIM slots where you can use micro-SIM cards. The SIM1 supports 4G, 3G and 2G but the SIM2 only supports 2G. You must be careful about that fact while putting the SIMs in.

There is a double microphone noise cancellation system. The from MIC catches your voice and the rear one catches the ambient noise. A software algorithm cancels the ambient noise from the voice sound and thus makes your voice legible even in a noisy place over a phone call.

The phone’s GPS has no trouble to lock. You can see that it would take only 5 to 6 seconds to get a GPS lock in a place with decent GPS signal.

The device does not have any navigation LED. Some people will not like it. There is also no backlit hardware buttons, too. So, it would be difficult to operate the phone in dark conditions. Lenovo, you should not save money by shaving some cheap LEDs.

There is a 1.2GHZ processor in the phone. It is a 64 bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 MSM8916 with quad cores. It is the 1^st 64 bit processor from Qualcomm. There is also an Adreno 306 GPU.

The phone has a 1GB RAM. The internal memory of the phone is 8GB. But only 4.22GB of it is free for the user after being used by the OS and the pre-installed apps. You will also get only about 400MB RAM free. The phone supports external micro-SD cards up to 32 GB.

Lenovo A6000 performs really well in real life situations. The operating system of the device is Android 4.4.4 Kitkat. There is Lenovo’s Vibe UI on top of the Android Kitkat to provide better usability. But some users may not like it.

The phone is fast and you will not experience any lag while using it. Most of the graphic intensive android games are playable in this phone. We have tested Real Racing 3 and Asphalt 8 on it.

Antutu Benchmark shows a result of 20115. Not bad, in fact Motorola Moto G 2^nd Gen scored 17102 in our test.

One of the most important features of a smartphone is its camera. Nowadays, mobile phones are replacing point and shoot digital cameras. Lenovo A6000 includes two snappers. The primary camera is of 8MP. There is also a secondary front camera of 2MP for video chatting and taking selfies.

The quality of the camera is good but not superb. Daylight shots are just fine but the low light shots are not that good. The front camera takes very good selfies. The camera flash is strong and really helps to take some photos in darkness.

The camera has auto-focus which works just fine in most cases. But if you try to take a close hot of anything, the focus seems to jump far away. The problem was not always present though.

There is Dolby digital sound support in the phone. To produce Dolby effects, the phone possesses two speakers. You can hear some great quality sound if you use a decent headphone. Do not use the free headphone to hear songs on your phone. Because of having two speakers, the phone is really loud.

Lenovo A6000 has a 2300 mAh battery. Nowadays, 2300 mAh is not much for a smartphone. But this device lasts enough. With heavy usage, you can go on for 10 to 12 hours. If you use the phone like regular user with occasional phone calling, some net browsing, an hour of listening to music and watching a video clip on YouTube, then you can expect to have your phone to be on for more than 24 to 30 hours.

I think battery backup is one of the most important aspects of a Smartphone. I am not going to buy any phone which will need to be charged every 3 times a day. In that case, you can trust the bettery life Lenovo A6000.

Now, the time has to come to give a final judgment about this phone. Our review of Lenovo A6000 is complete and our final report about this phone is that it is worth buying at Rs 6999.

Is this phone better than its two competitors Redmi Note 4G and Yu Yureka? We can’t say that. All these phones are great but the Redmi and Yureka is priced more (Redmi Note 4G Rs:9999 Yu Yureka Rs: 8999.

It is very difficult the find out any phone better than A6000 at that price range. That is why the phone has been sold like a hotcake. Flipkart first sold 10000 units of this handset on 28^th January and all sold within two seconds. Again they sold 20000 units and all units were sold within 3 seconds. This is what Flipkart is telling us do not ask us to verify these claims.

What we can say that if you want to grab a great phone at a very affordable price do not waste your time. Book one such phone from Flipkart as fast as possible.