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Test review of the Lenovo K900 smartphone.

Test review of the Lenovo K900 smartphone.

Communicator Lenovo K900 attracts everyone's attention, primarily due to two of the most significant factors. Firstly, it is based on Intel's new hardware platform: the heart of the device is an Intel Atom Z2580 processor with two cores and Hyper-Threading technology, which operates at a frequency of 2 GHz. Taking this into account, this Android smartphone, according to the results of various tests, is quite expectedly occupies a leading position among the most productive mobile devices of this class. And secondly, and this already concerns the appearance, this huge 5.5-inch smartphone immediately attracts surprised looks with its very noticeable appearance. The reason for this is the case material - metal, or, more precisely, its abundance, thanks to which the K900 sparkles at the stands of many exhibitions and presentations. The amendment was not made by chance, since not all the main elements of the device are made of metal. Only a few details are made entirely of metal - the back panel, mechanical buttons located on the case, and a slot for installing a SIM card. The material of the frame of the smartphone, on which the listed metal elements are installed, is not metal, but plastic - polycarbonate, so skillfully copying metal that the difference cannot be immediately discerned. However, you should not be too upset about this, since polycarbonate is a very high quality and durable modern material that looks much better than stainless steel in terms of weight reduction. Thus, Lenovo engineers managed to create not only a high-performance, high-quality and attractive, but also, importantly, a rather light device - its weight is a little more than 160 g, and this, given its huge dimensions, is a very good indicator.

Packaging

The box in which the K900 is packed boasts a very attractive and uncommon appearance. The material for its production was high-quality cardboard with a rubberized and pleasant-to-touch coating, which resembles a soft touch coating. The box is rectangular, small, made in black colors. Some nobility and high cost is added to it by a catchy outer casing, on which huge letters are cut that make up the device's index - K900. If you disassemble the packaging, you can see a blood-red backing under the carved letters, which, together with the general black tones of the box, sets you up for a very serious perception of the product inside. In a word, the box of the smartphone looks very expressive, with all its appearance hinting at the content belonging to the premium class.

If we talk about the premium quality of the new smartphone, then you need to understand that the K900 model is really a huge step forward for the Chinese company. This model is not only nominally designated in the list of Lenovo products as the flagship in the entire line of communicators, but also very different in its characteristics and appearance and is far enough away from all previously produced mobile phones at the company's factories. It is not the low-cost plastic consumer goods that Lenovo has flooded its own market with, but the bird of a higher flight - a smartphone that can break into the upper echelon of mobile devices and take the first lines of the ratings along with the generally recognized leaders of the segment. In addition, given the fairly reasonable price for a smartphone with such a stylish appearance and powerful hardware, the K900 has every chance of winning a wide range of adherents.

However, everything in the box itself is rather modest, and the breadth of the K900's configuration is not at all amazing.Here you can find a standard charger with a USB output, a USB connection cable and a modest-looking wired stereo headset with simple headphones made of inexpensive plastic. The set also includes an operating manual in Russian, packed in a separate box, which contains another accessory that has become common lately - a metal key-clip designed to remove a container with a SIM card.

Design

Continuing the theme of widespread use of metal in K900, it can be noted that the vast majority of elements are made of it. The powerful all-metal back panel, which is a fairly thick stainless steel plate, covers almost the entire surface of the smartphone, of course, with the exception of the front plane. After all, it is not flat, but curved at the edges. With this in mind, it is the side edges of the back cover that are the side edges of the phone case, which greatly increases its overall strength. And on the outside, the plastic frame is just a few thin strips at the top and bottom of the case. Thus, it can be unambiguously asserted that the K900 has a metal body rather than a plastic one.

The entire front panel of the K900 is covered with a second generation Gorilla Glass, which is very scratch resistant. It has a slot for the earpiece, which is covered with a thin metal mesh. Under the glass, next to the speakers, you can see the eyes of the sensors and the front camera. The glass is flat and has no sides.

On the back panel there is an inscription Intel Inside, as well as a rear camera window and an LED flash. The K900 has a dual flash and shines very brightly. Below is the opening of the external speaker, covered with a grill with a protrusion that raises the device above the surface. However, the sound volume of the smartphone lying on the table is slightly muffled. This is due to the large surface area of ​​the device body.

The back cover is not removable. In any case, this is indicated in the official specifications. However, at its corners, you can see the hex heads of four metal screws. Therefore, we can assume that it is still possible to remove the rear panel, but, most likely, this is the prerogative of service center specialists.

Almost all elements on the K900 case have a traditional arrangement, although the placement of a 3.5 mm headphone jack on the bottom end rather than on the top is considered a rarity. The power / lock key is located on the right side, the two-position volume rocker is on the left. Below, near the audio output, there is a microUSB connector as standard, which is designed for charging and connecting to a computer. Regarding the control buttons for the system and standard applications, they are traditionally located under the display in one row. These buttons are touch-sensitive, but not virtual, but hardware, so the entire usable screen area is completely free of virtual control buttons. The central button has a Lenovo branded four-leaf icon. It is intended to return to the main screen.

Ease of use

The K900 smartphone has a huge 5.5-inch screen. Therefore, of course, it is very large in size and it can be attributed, as they say now, to a shovel phone. Although, to tell the truth, calling the K900 just doesn’t dare to call it that. If we compare it with many well-known shovel phones, such as Huawei Ascend Mate, LG Optimus G Pro and, of course, with the progenitor of the Samsung Galaxy Note shovel phones, we can definitely say that the K900, if it does not look miniature in appearance, then feels much lighter in the hands, less and more elegant than all the listed competitors - the owners of the largest dimensions on the market. And even the 5-inch Huawei Ascend G700 feels like a thick brick in the hands compared to the 5.5-inch, but neater and thinner K900.Undoubtedly, this effect is achieved, first of all, due to the unusually small thickness of the case, which is only 6.9 mm and makes the device completely flat compared to the aforementioned models, which have more weighty and thick cases. In fact, on paper the difference in thickness and weight is negligible, but in the hand the differences are more noticeable. Together with the cold steel surface, this all gives a very pleasant effect of perceiving the smartphone in the palm of your hand.

Indeed, the convenience of finding a smartphone in the hands is difficult to dispute, but carrying it in trouser pockets is out of the question. The large length of the case will simply not allow you to bend or unbend with such a phone in your pocket. In addition, the corners of the K900 are not rounded, but rather sharp, so its destiny is to be in a bag, belt bag or, in extreme cases, in the pockets of a jacket or jacket during transportation, but not in the pockets of trousers or shirt. Regarding the gender of the device, it can rightfully be called a unisex model - if a woman wants to have a shovel phone, then it is the K900 in her hand that will look the most elegant among all devices of similar sizes.

At the end of the description of the appearance and ease of use, it is worth paying attention to two points. Firstly, the final version of the device, which was eventually released on the market, for some reason does not have a side slot for a memory card. Pre-production samples of K900, which were presented at numerous exhibitions and presentations, had such a slot. This can be seen in numerous videos on the Web. Such a strange decision negates many of the advantages of a smartphone as a multimedia device, since the relatively small amount of memory that the developers left for users to store their own files will not be able to accommodate several high-quality movies or their own video files that the smartphone can shoot in Full HD resolution. Not to mention syncing Dropbox and Google+ photo files, own music archives, resource-intensive games, maps for navigation software, and more. In the case of the K900, users from the nominal 16 GB will have about 9 GB for all needs, which is frankly not enough today. Blind imitation of Apple's marketing tricks in this case is not very appropriate - a 5.5-inch multimedia Android communicator is necessary and can be stuffed to capacity with everything you need, and the K900 file system allows you to do this. There are already versions of the smartphone on sale with 32 GB of pre-installed memory, but in any case, the lack of the possibility of self-expanding the amount of memory is seen as a very sad miscalculation.

The second point, which is associated with the discrepancy between the final version and the prototype, is the variety of body colors. Initially, it was assumed that the K900 will have at least three or four color options - black, steel gray, bronze or gold, and even with a textured back wall. However, only two options are presented on the domestic market - Lenovo K900 Black Silver and Lenovo K900 Silver.

Display

K900 has a high-quality HD-screen with IPS-matrix, which is made using AH-IPS technology. Thanks to this, the graininess on the screen is not noticeable, the dot density is very high - 400 ppi, the responsiveness is at a very high level. Display dimensions - 116x68 mm, diagonal 5.5 inches (139 mm), resolution 1080p Full HD (1920x980).

The brightness of the display can be changed both manually and automatically. The light sensor located on the front panel to the left of the loudspeaker is responsible for the automatic adjustment. I was especially pleased with the adequacy of the automatic brightness control, which can be found not so often. The multitouch technology allows simultaneous processing of ten touches, which is confirmed by the AnTuTu Benchmark test. Also, the smartphone has a proximity sensor that blocks the display when you bring the device to your ear.

The screen of the smartphone is covered by a glass plate with a mirrored surface, which, judging by the reflection of bright rays of light, has a very effective anti-glare filter. The outer surface of the screen has a special grease-repellent (oleophobic) coating, thanks to which fingerprints do not appear as quickly as in the case of ordinary glass, and are much easier to remove.

The display has excellent viewing angles without inverting tints and without significant color shift, even with significant gaze deviations from the perpendicular to the plane of the display. When the gaze is deviated along the diagonal, the black field lightens very slightly and can acquire, depending on the direction of deviation, either red-violet shades, or remain neutral-gray.

In terms of its characteristics, the K900 display deserves very high marks. The colors have natural saturation, and the lightening of the black field with deviations is practically not noticeable.

Sound

In terms of hardware, the sound quality of the K900 cannot boast of anything outstanding. Both speakers sound quite loud, but the bass is practically inaudible - mostly high frequencies prevail, and with some metallic notes intertwined. But in terms of software, the company has equipped the K900 with the highest quality sound equipment. Special attention is paid to the breadth of the software settings - its own graphical shell, energy saving settings, proprietary drawing of icons and pictograms. K900 has quick access to sound profiles, sound control using movements or gestures, and even switching on / off sound on a schedule (for example, at night).

The standard equipment includes an FM radio and a voice recorder. Their settings are very simple, and the radio works only when headphones are connected, which act as an external antenna.

Cameras

Like most modern communicators, the K900 has two digital camera modules.

The front camera is equipped with a 2 MP module and allows you to take pictures in 1920 x 1080 format.

The main (rear) camera has a resolution of 13 MP and is equipped with a Sony Exmor sensor, which is characterized by a BSI backlit sensor. By default, it shoots in widescreen mode, and the maximum resolution that can be set is 9 MP with an aspect ratio of 16: 9. In this case, the images will be 2034x4096 in size. To increase the size of the resulting photos to the maximum, you must manually switch to 13 MP resolution and the images will be 3072x4096 in size with an aspect ratio of 4: 3.

In the smartphone camera, you can immediately notice some shortcomings, which well-known manufacturers are trying to get rid of as soon as possible. The noticeable noise reduction and sharpening of photographs does not allow you to call the camera an artistic one - it is intended exclusively for documentary shots. In general, it is quite difficult to characterize the physical elements of the camera, since the absence of chromatic aberrations and moderate noise suggests that the lens and matrix of the camera are not bad, and the whole thing is spoiled by the program. Of course, the odd metering upsets most of all, because overall the camera is not very outstanding, but not so bad. It is not possible to attribute this problem to the weather conditions under which the test shooting was carried out, since other models demonstrate an amazing ability to equalize exposure even when shooting against the sun.

The K900 boasts a fairly large aperture with an f / 1.8 aperture, but if used unwisely, it won't do any good. For example, the Asus Padfone and HTC One also have a large f / 2.0 aperture, but they use it very wisely, although each in its own way. And when looking at the macro shots taken by the K900, one cannot say that the smartphone uses a large aperture.

In general, there is a strong impression that Lenovo has rushed to release a smartphone, which is why the camera looks raw.It is hoped that such image quality is not the limit for the camera's capabilities and the Sony Exmor matrix is ​​capable of more with the optimal interaction of optics and a competent program. Therefore, I would like to believe that Lenovo engineers in the next firmware will modify the camera driver, allowing it to work at full capacity.

The company has supplied its smartphone with settings for controlling the camera with interest - there are so many of them that the settings section had to be divided into three separate parts. In order not to list them all, we can simply say that there are a lot of them for a regular smartphone camera, and an amateur photographer will never use even a tenth of them.

Shooting control can be carried out in two ways - using a software icon-icon on the display or using a hardware volume control button, which turns into a shutter button in shooting mode. This function is very useful in cold weather, when there is no desire to take off the gloves. On the positive side, one can also note the possibility of taking photos while recording video files.

Software

The K900 is based on the software platform Google Android version 4.2.1, on top of the standard interface of which the manufacturer has installed its own shell, which bears the brand name ideaDesktop. The developers did not make any special changes to the system - only the shell interface was slightly changed and its own widgets were added to the device screen. The main and most important of them is the very branded quatrefoil, which has a control circle in the middle. In standby mode, its petals can be pulled to the side, selecting any instantly executable function (for example, entering the shooting mode).

The settings menu is divided into three sections, and navigation between them is carried out using the selection bar located at the top of the display. The General section contains all the functions that, according to the developers, are frequently used and most demanded, and the All section contains a complete standard set of all Google Android settings. The functions of the notification bar are also accessed using the navigation bar located at the top of the screen. To customize the notification panel, click the icon in the upper corner of the display.

K900 is characterized by the presence of a huge number of pre-installed additional applications. Particularly worth noting is the program for system recovery, a proprietary file manager and a package for full-fledged work with office documentation. You can also independently download any application from the Google Play Store and install it on your smartphone, but such attention from developers who have placed a lot of widgets on desktops and arranged a large number of different applications in thematic folders is very encouraging.

Telephone part and communications

As far as communications are concerned, the K900 cannot boast of anything special in this regard. It works in 2G GSM and 3G WCDMA networks as standard, but it does not have the ability to work in the 5 GHz range of Wi-Fi networks and support for fourth generation (LTE) networks. It also lacks the ability to communicate over short distances using NFC technology. The radio part of the K900 is stable - no dropouts from the cellular network or spontaneous signal loss were noticed during testing. Considering the huge size of the screen and the large drawing of buttons, numbers of number dialing and letters of the virtual keyboard, making calls and typing SMS is very comfortable.

Spontaneous reboots, shutdowns or freezes of the K900 were not observed during testing. To reboot the smartphone on its own, you need to hold down the power key for a long time, and then select the appropriate item in the pop-up menu.

Performance

The K900 hardware platform is based on the Intel Atom Z2580 (Clover Trail +) single-chip system based on the x86 processor core architecture. It is worth noting that the company's previous devices were based on a system based on the ARM architecture.The Atom Z2580 has two cores that run at 2 GHz, and thanks to Hyper-Threading technology, they realize four threads of execution. The device has 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of built-in memory, of which, as mentioned earlier, 9 GB are available to the user. It can be noted that the K900 version has already been announced, which has a built-in memory of 32 GB, but it has not yet been officially supplied to the domestic market. Graphics processing is carried out using the PowerVR SGX 544MP2 chip, which has 2 cores and operates at a frequency of 533 MHz. This model is similar to the one used in the Apple A5 - SGX 543, but in the K900 it additionally has Direct3D 9.3 support.

The hardware performance of the K900 was compared using various popular benchmarks (AnTuTu Benchmark, GeekBench, Quadrant Standard) with the performance of other top modern smartphones - HTC One (Qualcomm Snapdragon 600), LG Google Nexus 4 (Qualcomm APQ8064), LG Optimus G Pro (Qualcomm Snapdragon 600), Oppo Find 5 (Qualcomm APQ8064), Samsung Galaxy S4 (Exynos 5410 Octa), Sony Xperia Z (Qualcomm APQ8064). Lenovo's flagship has shown excellent results, ahead of even such a recognized leader as the Samsung Galaxy S4. But this only concerns the popular AnTuTu Benchmark, which really liked the speed of work with the K900's memory, and did not show any record results in other test programs. As for testing the graphics subsystem using the 3DMark cross-platform test, the K900 showed quite decent, although far from record results - 7259 points. In the High Performance mode of the Epic Citadel game application, the smartphone showed almost the maximum possible results - 58.2 fps, and in the more complex High Quality and Ultra High Quality modes, it showed 57.2 fps and 33.6 fps, respectively, leaving behind only the Samsung Galaxy S4. By the way, the K900 didn't notice much heat in the case even at maximum loads.

Playing video files

The smartphone does not have an MHL interface, so testing was limited to displaying video files on the display of the device itself. For this, we used a set of test video files with a moving rectangle and an arrow, the frequency of which is one division per frame. The tests were carried out with varying resolution (1280x720 and 1920x1080) and frame rates (25, 30, 50 and 60 frames per second).

With the exception of files with a frequency of 50 frames per second, at which for some reason, from 7 to 10 frames per second were skipped, all the rest were reproduced without any errors. Although uniform frame interleaving can in any case be called a relatively unstable state, since various internal and external background processes entail periodic failure of the correct interleaving of intervals between some frames or groups of frames, and even to the skipping of individual frames. When playing videos with Full HD resolution (1920 × 1080), the image of the file was displayed exactly along the edges of the screen. However, this phenomenon was observed only with software decoding of files, and with hardware decoding, the horizontal resolution was halved and the vertical black-and-white stripes through one pixel became indistinguishable and merged into a gray field. Most likely, the K900 requires serious software revision of the firmware or the player itself to fully utilize the hardware capabilities of the device.

Battery life

The capacity of the lithium-polymer rechargeable battery, which is installed in the K900, is 2500 mAh. This is understandable, since such a small capacity by today's standards is due to the extremely small thickness of the case. It is simply impossible to install a larger capacity battery in it. The battery of the smartphone is non-removable, so if problems arise, you will not be able to install a new one yourself. In addition, the user does not have the option of purchasing an additional battery to use as a spare.

K900 showed quite standard power consumption in all standard operating modes.At the same time, he did not concede to rivals, and did not outstrip them - everything is at an average level. But even average results are a positive indicator of the stability of the entire system. For example, the popular novelty of the last season, the Samsung Galaxy S4, even with the latest firmware, could not adequately pass the GLBenchmark test at the maximum load level in 3D game mode at 100% brightness and 60 fps. The smartphone of the Korean manufacturer was so hot that it was impossible to pick it up. And the energy was spent extremely quickly - the top smartphone of our time lasted only an hour and a half. And the hero of the review, without much heating, was able to play this test for two and a half hours.

Continuous reading of text files in the FBReader program at the minimum comfortable brightness level (100 cd per square meter) for two hours consumed about 20% of the full battery charge, and watching videos from the YouTube online service in HQ quality via Wi-Fi The Fi device has used up about 25% of the battery capacity. It took about two hours to fully charge the K900.

Final impressions

Lenovo's flagship model leaves mixed feelings after testing. On the one hand, I liked the K900 for its noble and neat appearance, which can be called premium and expensive. High-quality materials, an excellent level of assembly, elegant packaging, a powerful and efficient hardware system, a high level of autonomy - everything is up to par. On the other hand, some negative aspects spoil the overall positive impression. For example, the lack of a 5 GHz Wi-Fi band or support for LTE networks can be considered an insignificant trifle, but the lack of the ability to increase the amount of memory is so easy to forgive. And Intel's implementation of NFC support in software has stalled. However, the final assessment of the K900 can be given after a certain time, during which the developers will be able to eliminate some flaws and release more advanced firmware.

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