First impressions of the Lenovo A7000

Earlier this week, Lenovo launched the A7000 in India. It was announced in MWC 2015 and now it is available in India. Mobile phone manufacturers are targeting the budget segment market rather than concentrating on the high end mobiles. In those lines, the Lenovo A6000 was a huge success for Lenovo. It was selling like hot cakes in the weekly flash sales through flipkart. Now its successor Lenovo A7000 is here to take the center stage. Today, at an event in Bangalore, Lenovo introduced the mobile to us and here is what we think of it.

The Lenovo A7000 is going to available exclusively through Flipkart. It is a 4G enabled mobile with a 64-Bit 1.5GHz Cortex-A53 (MediaTek MT6752m) True Octa-Core processor and 2GB DDR3 RAM. It has a large 5.5 inch display and is powerd by a 2900 mAh battery. The highlight of this mobile is the Dolby® Atmos™ technology for Digital Signal processing (DSP). In plain words, this mobile promises you a great acoustic experience. It is thin at 7.9 mm and very light wiighing 140 grams. I thas 8 GB of internal storage, 8Mp rear camera and a 5MP front camera. While the specs are not the uber high end we have seen, it definitely explains the budget segment. Priced at Rs 8999, the Lenovo A7000 could be the best offering in its range.

It resembles the plain design of A6000. Nothing fancy with the A7000. It is plain and simple. The design does not give it a premium look, but it is comfortable to handle, thanks to its weight and thinness. The display is 720p HD and lacks any kind of tough glass protection. But nonetheless, it is a brilliant display with vibrant colors. It runs on Android Lollipop with the Vibe UI on top of it. It has a bunch of software loaded by default, but they can removed if needed. There is no lag in the UI. It is smooth and responsiveness, but the visual design lacks finesse. I am yet to the test the performance of the device, but my initial impressions gives a good gut feeling about it. The camera was decent, but failed to impress me while I was playing with it. But then we will have to wait for the review unit for my complete evaluation.

The key selling point of the Lenovo A7000 is the Dolby Atomos sound processing capability. While the technology sure looks impressive on the papers, I am still not sure of its capabilities on a phone of this size. We had chance to play around with the sound and it works the best with Dolby encoded content and an excellent sound system. It upscales any other encoding, but I need some lone time with it to actually gage its effectiveness.

The direct competitors for this mobile are Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G, Micromax Yu Yureka and the new Microsoft Lumia 640 XL. But the Lenovo A7000 has the potential to become the best budget device in this price point. Please go ahead and register yourself of the April 15^th sale in Flipkart. We will be at Flipkart office on the day at 2 PM to watch the flash sale magic happen. We are not sure about the number of devices that would go on sale on the day, but am sure the sale is gonna last only for a few seconds. Though it is announced in white and black, for now only the black color variant will be available for purchase.