The budget range phones are getting more and more powerful with every new device that is launching. And it’s not just the hardware but also the build and design too have seen huge jumps off the cheap plastic paradigm. Lenovo has had good success with its K Note Series and the last one was the K4 Note that came with the powerful audio ability and build. Continuing on the K Note lineage, Lenovo had launched the K5 Note in China sometime back and have now officially launched it in India starting at 11,999 INR. Let’s see what it has to offer and our quick thoughts on how it fares with the competition.
The K5 Note has a slight change in its overall design and has now gone a little curvier and in some angles resembles the likes of phones like Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 3! Coming in gold, silver and gray colors, the phone is now more shiny, metallic and slippery as well. Weighing at 165gms and maxing at a thickness of 8.5mm, it is not the slimmest or lightest phones but considering a 5.5″ screen Lenovo has done well here and the phone feels good in the hand. The 5.5″ Full HD display packs in 401 pixels per inch and is made of LTPS IPS LCD with 400 NIT brightness. The phone has a fingerprint scanner which Lenovo claims will unlock in as fast as 0.3 secs.
Under the hood, the K5 Note packs a Mediatek Octa-Core MT6755 Helio P10 processor clocked at 1.8GHz with a Mali T860 GPU. Accompanying this is 3GB/4GB of RAM and 32GB of internal memory that can be expanded up to 128GB. The phone runs on Lenovo’s custom Pure UI skin built off Android Marshmallow. The software will also feature “Secure Zone” where the users can have multiple accounts of Facebook, WhatsApp and such, just like we’ve seen in MIUI 8. This way users do not have to rely on rooting or third party software to achieve this. As usual, there is hardware support for enhanced audio experience in the form of Dolby Atmos. All of this is powered by a 3500mAh non-removable battery
The K5 Note comes with a 13MP primary camera with PDAF, f/2.2 aperture, dual-tone LED flash and a secondary camera of 8MP with wide-angle ability. The phone also comes with a fingerprint scanner at the back which is more circular in nature which is a change from its predecessor. In terms of connectivity, the phone supports Dual SIM 4G LTE and VoLTE, FM radio and also NFC. The phone also comes with most of the popular sensors including gyroscope for the VR frenzy folks. For the audiophiles, there is also Wolfson WM8281 audio codec too for an enhanced audio experience.
All of K5 Note is good barring the processor which is not as powerful as the ones we’ve seen in the competition such as LeEco Le 2 and Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and so on. When a phone is marketed as #KillerNote5, one tends to expect some powerful specifications apart from a well designed metallic build. We will wait until we get our hands on the K5 Note to see how Lenovo may have optimized the software in lieu of a less powerful SoC as compared to the top sellers our there.
The K5 Note goes on sale for Rs. 11,999 for the 3GB RAM variant and Rs. 13,999 for the 4GB variant exclusively on Flipkart from Aug 3rd 11:59 PM onwards, with bundled offers of TheatreMax game controller for 999 INR and VR for 1299 INR. There are exchange offers as well.
