Lenovo Z1 : You should consider buying this phone

Lenovo Z1 is an Android smartphone that is going on sale in India in few days time (Amazon India, flash sale). The Lenovo Z1, sold as Zuk Z1 in some parts of the world is priced at 13,499/- in India. The Lenovo Z1 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chip, has 3GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and has a 5.5″ FullHD display. Here are a few reasons why you should seriously consider this phone as a worthy mid range smartphone.

CyanogenOS

There are more than a dozen brands from China that sell phones in India. And if you take a look at these phones, they all have very similar UI. Its like the only difference is in the icon pack, wallpaper etc. They all come without an app drawer and for those who install handful of apps, organizing home screen will be a painful task. One of the general rules of using Android is to keep the home screen as minimalist as you can. Lack of app drawer negates this. The other elements of design too feels similar.While these UIs allow some customization, its not exactly perfect.

CyanogenOS is based on Android OS and is extremely popular among those who prefer a cleaner and powerful ROM. In recent years, CM team managed to strike a deal with some OEMs to provide a much stable CyanogenOS with official support and development channel. The Lenovo Z1 comes with CyanogenOS 12.1 (an upgrade to CM13 is around the corner). You can read my post on how CyanogenMod runs better than a stock ROM on the Nexus 6 by going to this page. By bundling CyanogenOS, Lenovo Z1 is giving a unique experience and deep customizability for users.

Some of the great features are:

• Theme store
• Display Calibration
• Advanced Gestures
• Custom Profiles that change behaviour of phone
• Clean Android experience, No Bloatware
• Heavy interface customization options
• Powerful AudioFX app for tweaking sound quality
• Privacy Guard (individual app permissions)

Display
Lenovo tout that the display of the Z1 has 100% NTSC color gamut. This means that the color reproduction on this phone will be fairly accurate. The FullHD display indeed looked very good when we tried at an event. This, coupled with built in storage of 64GB gives users a great multimedia experience. A great feature in the phone is ‘adaptive display’ where the display tone is changed according to the time of day to reduce the eye strain. Users can set it to automatic or switch between different modes.

Battery
A 4000mAh battery is for sure going to give huge battery life and given that the phone does not come with all guns blazing SD 810 or 820, you can expect very impressive battery life out of the phone. CM OS comes with quick toggle to switch between different modes (performance, quick, balanced, efficiency, power save).

Another interesting feature is that when you connect the phone to an external power source, once the battery reaches 100%, charging is cut off and the phone will be powered by the external power source while the battery remains at 100%. This way the battery will not fluctuate between 99% and 100%. This mechanism is used in laptops and good to see that it has made its way into smart phones.

Under the hood
There is no other phone inside 15k INR that comes with a massive 64GB storage. Lenovo Z1 does not come with a microSD card slot but the 64GB of storage is more than enough for the majority and if you want to expand further, you can make use of USB OTG (connect external pen drive). Those who have used the phone mentioned that the read-write speed of the onboard storage is vary fast which is essential given the huge size. The phone is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 801. The SD801 is on-par with chips like Snapdragon 650/652 and is one of the most stable chipsets that Qualcomm ever released. The SD801 is a proven workhorse and given that CM OS itself is very light on resources, you need not worry about CPU power.

Camera
The sony IMX rear module is proven to take good quality photos under various lightning conditions but do not expect this to beat D-SLRs in picture quality. For a phone that costs 13,499/-, the camera quality is very good

Price
When we first tried the phone, we were impressed with it. The only concern was ‘what would be the price’. At 13,499/- the Lenovo Z1 is a definite winner and is going on to our recommended phones list. Go ahead and get one when the phone goes on sale this 19th.