GADGETS AND GIZMOS SPECIAL..... Lenovo K900

Lenovo K900

Great Outside Intel Inside

The beautifully designed Lenovo K900 is fast and furious but gets a little hot under the collar

It's quite obvious that Lenovo, known more for its laptops and ultrabooks, aimed to get into the Indian mobile market with all guns blazing. They launched six smartphones, of which the K900 is the crème de la crème. And you can get a taste of that crème right from the packaging. The flagship phone comes in one of the best boxes I’ve seen, designed with deliberate care and understated elegance, and made up of some interesting soft coating that feels quite sensual to the touch. That box says one thing, and it says it loud and clear: Inside is a top-of-the-line precision-manufactured piece of electronics for those who care about classiness. And for sure, the moment you lift out the K900 and turn it around in your hands, you’ll be amazed at the stainless steel finish on the back, made more elegant by the Lenovo and Intel logos designed into the smoothness.
 

This device has that straight lines look people love and it’s remarkably light, thin and flat. However, it’s also tall and narrow, so pocketability is an issue. It’s not as comfortable to hold as phones with rounded edges, but it’s not problematic either.
 

What also looks good is the hi-res display on which colours look natural rather than exaggerated and saturated. Viewing angles are just fine as well and the screen is bright. In fact, it may need a bit of adjusting.
 

But the K900 is by no means all beauty and no brains. It’s also fast and fluid. In fact, it’s got a sort of butteriness check right on the surface because a fun animation twirls the collection of apps when you scroll through them. And you can see that it handles this animation very well. Navigating the phone, switching apps, running videos, etc., were all fast on this phone. So was running apps.

Browsing too is fast but could have been a bit smoother. But there’s one problem: it does get warmed up for some reason, perhaps because of the materials used.
 

The phone runs on Android Jelly Bean 4.2, which is the latest that can be at the moment. Opinions differ on LePhone, the interface that Lenovo has sitting on top of Jelly Bean and customising it. It’s a mixed bag with some nice touches and some annoying, but that’s the case with all interfaces and your preferences depend on what you’re familiar with. For example, the widgets are buried too deep and I’m accustomed to having quick access to these. There’s a particularly nice widget, incidentally, that shows remaining power status and has shortcuts to settings you can adjust to prolong battery life, which is average on its 2500 mAh non-removable.
 

The camera has top of the line specs, including an f/1.8 sensor which should make it just what is needed for low-light indoor photos. The camera software is full of settings as well.
 

But I wasn’t able to get good results out of this, though the wide angle and the elongated screen on this phone made it more interesting. Taking a shot indoors with a single but medium-bright lamp on, I got an intense amount of noise. The same happened with a shot of a piece of furniture in a room in which some daylight was streaming in through a window, which isn’t even that low-light. In brighter light, it was difficult focusing and getting sharp results.
 

The K900 goes for a price of Rs 32,900 and that is real value for money considering the design, size and performance. Given what premium smartphones cost these days, it’s a great price. 

It may even be available for lower.  

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