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In Kenya there used to be a time when the phone market was dominated by a few major brands like Nokia and Alcatel. These days one is spoilt for choice in terms of which phone brand to pick as the brands try to outcompete each other in terms of quality and the number of features. I have to say that prior to this i had not used a Lenovo phone but having used their laptops I was sure that it was of good quality.

I had the pleasure of taking the Note out for a test drive and these are my thoughts;

Appearance

The phone comes featuring a unibody metal design with smooth edges that give the phone a premium look. The volume rocker together with the power button can be found on the right. A notification LED and a front facing camera is above the display. The SIM tray can be found to the left of the device.

It has a 5.5 screen with an IPS capacitive touchscreen with 16 million colours. This screen is highly sensitive to touch such that one can use the touchscreen while wearing gloves. It has a resolution of 1080 x 1920 (401 ppi density) which makes for good viewing.

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Camera

If selfies are your thing, you will love this phone as the 8 MP front camera takes nice photos. I have to say selfies are not my thing but I like the ones I took with this phone’s camera. Sadly, it does not have a front flash/LED light so you cannot be able to take selfies in low light conditions.

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The Lenovo K5 has a 13 MP back camera that takes some decent photos with resolution of up to 4096 x 2304 pixels.

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The SGR being constructed at Athi River

The SGR being constructed at Athi River

Photo taken during the Save the Railway exhibition

Photo taken during the Save the Railway exhibition

Fingerprint Sensor

The phone comes with a fingerprint sensor at the back just below the camera. The sensor can be able to save different fingers and makes unlocking the phone much easier. Other than unlocking the phone one can tap it to click pictures and authorizing payments.

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Sound

The K5 comes with state of the art audio technology from Dolby to deliver 5.1 channel surround audio in the phone. This makes listening to music or watching videos a pleasure. It also has active noise cancellation which ensures that the sound emitted is crisp.

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Performance

The phone comes with a 3GB RAM, a Mediatek MT6755 Helio P10 octa core processor (4×1.8 GHz Cortex-A53 & 4×1.0 GHz Cortex-A53) and a Mali – T860 GPU for enjoyable multitasking and responsiveness. The operating system is the Android 5.1 Lollipop with Lenovo’s Vibe UI skin lying on top of it.

Battery

The phone comes packed with a 3500 mAh battery which is non removable. It can last you a whole day with heavy usage and a day and a half with moderate usage. The battery also supports fast charging.

Storage

The phone comes with 32 GB internal memory which can be expanded to 256 GB with the use of a microSD if needed.

SIM

The phone can hold two SIM cards in the SIM tray. The SIM cards have to be nano. The SIM slots are hybrid in that one SIM slot doubles up as a microSD card slot. This means that at any one time you can either have two SIM cards or one SIM card and a microSD card.

Network and Connectivity

The phone comes with 4G capabilities. Calls on the phone are pretty clear and internet is good both on mobile and Wi-Fi.

 Conclusion

This phone is a pleasure to use and a definite buy for me.