INTRODUCTION
When the world is going the octa core way (ala Samsung Galaxy S4), Lenovo has gotten inspired by Motorola. The Lenovo P770, at first sight, may seem like your ordinary mid-range android phone (which it is, actually) but uncover the back panel and boom! you find a monstrous battery. Does the USP of this device make it a worthy buy?
Lets find out..
Key Features
- 4.5" qHD IPS LCD display - 540x960 pixels
- Mediatek MT6577 chipset
- Dual-core ARM Cortex A9 - 1.2 GHz processor and PowerVR SGX531 graphics
- 1GB RAM
- 5 Megapixel Auto Focus camera with 720p video recording.
- LED flash
- 0.3MP (VGA) Front Facing Camera
- Quad Band 2G and Single Band 3G with data speeds upto 7.2 Mbps DL and 5.76 Mbps UL - SIM 1 & Quad Band 2G - SIM 2
- 4GB storage with microSD expansion slot
- Wi-Fi b/g/n
- Bluetooth
- GPS
- Proximity Sensor, Light Sensor and Gravity Sensor
- 3500 mAh Battery
- Android 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean) OS
- SAR Value - 0.43 W/Kg
UNBOXING THE LENOVO P770
Lenovo P770 comes in an attractive little box in which you will also find the battery, micro USB cable that doubles up as a charging cable for the A/C adaptor, single piece headset, an OTG cable and a warranty card with the list of authorised service centres in India.
There’s no microSD card bundled with the phone.
DESIGN & BUILD QUALITY
At 162gms the phone is by all means heavy. You could very well pardon the heft because the phone features a monstrous
battery!
The phone houses a 4.5 inch qHD capacitive IPS TFT LCD display. Above it is the earpiece and next to the earpiece are the proximity and light sensors and also the notification LED. Beneath the display there are 3 backlit capacitive keys – Menu, Home, and Back. The keys are haptic feedback enabled. A microphone sits below these keys.
The left side of the P770 is completely bare.
On the right side we find the volume rocker.
On the top side we have the 3.5mm headset jack and next to it are the micro USB port and power button.
The back of the device houses a 5 MP Auto Focus Camera with an LED Flash. On the bottom side we find the Lenovo insignia and the speakerphone grille is placed at the bottom right side.
Underneath the battery cover, we find a beefy 3500 mAh battery, the micro SD card slot and the dual SIM card slots. SIM 1 supports both 2G and 3G networks while SIM 2 slot supports only 2G networks. The back cover is glossy and attracts fingerprints. The display already has a screenguard applied to it.
Overall the handset looks decent, the build quality is quite good and you will definitely feel the handset's weight in your hand .
DISPLAY
Decent Display lacking contrast.
The Lenovo P770 features a 4.5 inch IPS display of qHD resolution (540x960 pixels) and pixel density of 245 ppi. Auto Brightness is available as the phone houses an ambient light sensor.
The onscreen images are quite crisp albeit with a little washed out colours. The blacks look grey and so the phone suffers on the contrast ratio as well. Viewing angles are quite good though though since the display is IPS.
In comparison to the new phones from Indian manufacturers such as the Micromax Canvas HD A116 the display looks ordinary.
Don't get me wrong. Its still pretty sharp but the colors and contrast could definitely have been much better!
USER INTERFACE
The P770
runs Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean out of the box. Lenovo has made some customizations to this phone, like including scrollable toggles on the notification bar, changing the color theme of the phone to white, removing the battery stats tab in settings, but installing a handful of useful applications on the phone.
The phone has a five-pane homescreen configuration and a standard set of widgets are included.
The notification bar has 13 toggles which include Energy Smart, Brigtness, Display Timeout, Auto Rotation Lock, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Data Connection, Airplane Mode, 4 Sound Profiles - General, Silent, Meeting and Outdoor.
The app drawer is pretty standard with 2 tabs. The first one is the apps tab which lists all the applications installed on the phone while widgets are listed under a separate tab.
PERFORMANCE
The Lenovo P770 is powered by a MediaTek MT6577 chipset which packs a 1.2GHz Dual Core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 1GB of RAM and PowerVR SGX531 GPU. It comes with 4GB of internal space out of which a total of 2 GB is reserved for Apps while 1.1 GB is available to the user.
Out of the 1 GB RAM, a good 981 MB is usable, out of which ~360 MB is freely available to the user after you've installed all the necessary apps. . During my time with the phone, no lags were witnessed which is a commendable job by Lenovo.
The CPU performance is average. It does pull its weight while executing apps and games and also making the interface feel relatively fluid but is by no means a good performer especially on a qHD display.
Games like Temple Run, Temple Run 2, Angry Birds, etc. run lag free though the phone gets slight hickups in coping with more high-end games like Dead Trigger, NFS Most Wanted.
Here are some of the benchmarks –
TELEPHONY & MESSAGING
This is another area where Lenovo could have done better. The earpiece does not output loud volumes. Moreover, the in-call sound was unspectacular, if not poor. There was certainly some muffling and disturbance in the earpiece even when the phone was used on Airtel's 3G network. However, callers on the other end were pleased with the call quality. The phone offers nice reception and no dropped calls were experienced during the testing period.
The dialler has been customized by Lenovo. There are 2 call buttons on the bottom. Tapping on the first button lets you place an IP call and the second button will place the regular cellular call. To the right of the call buttons is the messaging button that takes you to the messaging app.
The dialler is just the first tab of the phone app, the other three being the Call log, the Contacts tab and the groups tab.
The dialler is fixed to a portrait mode even if auto rotation is turned on.
The speaker phone’s output is neither too loud nor too quiet. You will have no troubles hearing your phone ring in most places except in extremely noisy outdoor surroundings.
There is nothing special about the messaging app. It may look different but it is essentially the stock android app with lenovo's custom skin on top. It works like the stock Android messaging app which is a good thing in our books. Fortunately, Auto rotation works here.
GALLERY, VIDEO & MUSIC PLAYERS
The default view of the gallery is Albums. It lists all the folders with Photos and Videos in the phone. Getting inside an album displays all the photos or videos in a rectangular grid, which is horizontally scrollable.
The Stock Video Player plays MP4 files upto 720p resolution. A 3rd party player such as MX Player or Dice Player solves the limited codec support problem. The processor handled 720p videos like a champ.
The phone comes with Play Music as its default music app -
AUDIO QUALITY
The audio quality is pretty darn good. The bundled earphones are very poor though and should be thrown in the garbage can straightaway..yes..we're serious. After using a better set of earphones, the sound quality was quite good though it slightly lacked the oomph bass and also minimal noise was present which is still better than loads of handsets in the market even from the ones manufactured by the likes of Samsung and LG. Overall, a very good performance in this department.
CAMERA - IMAGE QUALITY
As far as image quality is concerned, the Lenovo P770 produces some pleasing photos in broad daylight which are not only more-than-passable for Social Networking but also good enough for your 5x7 prints. Low Light performance is average and I suggest you to use the led flash as much as possible. Overall, it produces decent photos
. You should still not replace your digital camera just yet.
The flash does overpower everything in close up photos.
Check out some of the camera samples here:-
For the High Resolution Samples click
HERE
More photos will be uploaded soon.
VIDEO CAMERA
Due to the fairly capable processor, the Lenovo P770 manages to shoot videos upto 1280x720 pixels(720p). It uses 3gp container at a low bitrate which gives only passable videos.
The interface is identical to the still camera interface. There are options to change the video resolution and toggle capture sound. The various video resolutions in which the device can shoot are VGA(640x480 pixels), HVGA(480x240) and QCIF(176x144)..
The video quality is reminiscent of the still image quality. It will suffice for sending videos as MMS but is not worth framing memories.
Video sample will soon be uploaded on youtube
CONNECTIVITY
The phone supports 2 SIM Cards. The 1st SIM Card slot supports 3G as well as 2G networks with 3G speeds maxing out at 7.2Mbps downlink & 5.76Mbps uplink. The 2nd SIM card slot supports only 2G networks.
EDGE is supported on 2G networks for both the SIM slots.
The phone has no problems with receiving incoming calls even when data on the other SIM is being used.
Local connectivity includes Wi-Fi b/g/n, Wi-Fi Hotspot and Bluetooth.
The phone has a weak Wi-Fi antenna and although I could browse the internet comfortably from a distance of 10 metres over a Wi-Fi N signal, the signal disappeared totally as soon as I was 13 meters
away from the router. At this point my Galaxy S2 showed a signal strength of 27%.
WEB BROWSER
The stock web browser on the phone has always been brilliant and here due to the decent processing power the browsing experience is pretty pretty good. It is miles ahead of Symbian browsers and also browsers of the yester years andoid phones. There are very minimal rare lags when trying to browse a multimedia rich webpage.
After having side-loaded Adobe’s Flash player from XDA-Forums, it worked just fine with YouTube videos.
BATTERY LIFE
This is the section you all have been waiting for. How does the 3500 mAh (the largest battery to have been put in a phone) perform? Well, its pretty good but call me skeptical, I'm sure the RAZR MAXX I've had in the past used to last longer with its 3300mAh battery. This does not, however, mean that the Lenovo's battery is incapable. It beats nearly all the phones in the market save for the RAZR MAXX and DROID RAZR MAXX HD.
The phone easily made it one full day with a 100% charge. With Auto brighntess and the phone constantly connected to a 3G data connection(when I was out of my wifi signal), the phone made it through the day with relatively heavy usage. The screen on time was 5.5 hours. GPS was on for around an hour. I watched an hour long video, listened to music for an hour and browsed the web for 4 hours(which included downloading data constantly for 1 hour). Apart from this, around half an hour worth of calls were made and received. I also used whatsapp for an additional half hour.
You just cannot kill the phone's battery in one day (if you're normal and have a life). As happy as I am with the battery life with this phone it still does not dethrone the RAZR MAXX & DROID RAZR MAXX HD - the former gave me an additional 20% stamina with a similar usage pattern. However, we should also note that the phone supports 2 SIM cards which I'm sure draws some additional power as well.
CONCLUSION
Lenovo's USP is its battery life and it DOES deliver. In this department, the P770 beats all phones which are presently available in the Indian Market. At a price range of INR 13500(even less if you find a good deal online), it is absolutely worth every single penny you pay for it.
If battery life is what you seek, look no further!!
