Cameraphone. The first associations that arise with this word are a bulky smartphone with an overly protruding camera lens, a mediocre design and an overpriced price. But do not succumb to stereotypes. Today I will tell you about Lenovo Vibe Shot – an anti-crisis camera phone with a stylish and thin body.
Design and management
Lenovo Vibe Shot received an attractive design and expensive body materials: the front and back are made of glass, and the frames are made of metal. At first glance, the smartphone received a unique design, but if you look closely, you notice that the company’s designers decided to peep the most interesting ideas from competitors and mix them together. As a result, Vibe Shot is equipped with an iPhone 5S-style frame and a back panel, as in Sony Cyber-Shot T-series digital cameras, to hint to others about the photo capabilities of the device.
The dimensions of the smartphone are 143×70×7.6 mm, weight 145 g. In my opinion, it is these characteristics that are the limit, after which the use of a smartphone with one hand becomes inconvenient. The case is well assembled, nothing creaks or flexes. The only thing is that the glass on the back is not very durable and does not have an oleophobic coating, so it easily collects fingerprints and scratches.
The front panel traditionally houses a 5-inch display, below it are three backlit touch keys “Multitasking Menu”, “Home” and “Back”. Above the front camera and a standard set of sensors. The left side of the smartphone is equipped only with slots for a memory card and two microSIM cards. On the right side, there is a whole scattering of buttons: a volume rocker, a lock / power button, a two-position switch for shooting modes (auto / manual) and a camera activation button. By the way, the camera button also serves to focus if you hold it halfway, as in real cameras.
Speakers, a microUSB port and an eyelet for a cord are located on the bottom edge, as in soap dishes. The top edge is equipped with a microphone and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The back panel is equipped with a main camera, a triple LED flash, a company logo and a standard product label.
Display
The 5-inch display is made using IPS technology and has a resolution of 1980×1020 pixels, a pixel density of 441 ppi. The viewing angles are wide, but not maximum: with a large deviation, the contrast is slightly lost. The color reproduction is far from natural, the shades are oversaturated and in this regard they are more like the color reproduction of AMOLED displays, which can not be called either an advantage or a disadvantage, because everyone has their own tastes in this regard.
Lenovo gives users the opportunity to adjust the display settings themselves: in the settings, you can change its hue and saturation. In the settings, you can also turn on the high sensitivity mode for working with gloves at negative air temperatures.
The maximum brightness of the display reaches 500 cd / m2, with a minimum backlight, the brightness will be about 22-23 cd / m2. In addition, the smartphone has a night mode, in which the brightness drops to 3 cd / m2 for comfortable use in the dark. The contrast level is 1:907, which is not bad for an IPS-matrix, although it is still far from the market leaders, whose contrast reaches 1:1200.
Software
The smartphone runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop with a proprietary Vibe UI launcher. The interface has been significantly modified and there is very little left of the original Android: a notification curtain and a couple of other little things. There is support for custom themes and animations. Everything works quite quickly, although occasionally there are small delays.
Performance
The heart of the Lenovo Vibe Shot is a 64-bit Qualcomm MSM8939 Snapdragon 615 processor with 8 Cortex-A53 cores. The cores are divided into two groups: the first operates at a frequency of up to 1 GHz and is designed for everyday work, and the second – at a frequency of up to 1.7 GHz and is included in the work while performing resource-intensive tasks, such as games or synthetic tests. The graphics core is Adreno 405 with support for DirectX 11.2 and OpenGL ES 3.0.
The amount of RAM is 3 GB, half of which is occupied by a system with a proprietary shell. The amount of internal memory is 32 GB, 25 GB is available to the user, but, as we remember, there is a microSD card slot (up to 128 GB), with which the total volume can reach 153 GB.
Since the Vibe Shot does not have the most top-end processor, the performance turned out to be appropriate: you can easily watch Full HD videos, play 2D arcade games and surf the Internet, but heavy games are too tough for him, at least at maximum settings. For example, games such as Modern Combat 5: Blackout, GTA: San Adreas, and Dead Trigger 2 start to experience severe framerate drops, although by lowering the graphics settings to medium, you can absolutely comfortably play anything.
In synthetic tests, the smartphone produces values corresponding to the flagships of the end of 2013/beginning of 2014. AnTuTu shows about 37-38 thousand points, which is in line with the results of the Nexus 5, LG G3 and slightly falls short of the budget Meizu M1 Note. In general, there is nothing wrong with this, because Vibe Shot is not intended for games and performance tests.
Battery Life
This smartphone is equipped with a 2900 mAh lithium polymer battery, which is normal for a device with such characteristics. In normal use with calls, the Internet, music and a couple of shots, the charge is enough for about 1-1.5 days. In a more economical mode, you can improve this figure to 2 days, but you should not expect miracles further.
Vibe Shot is capable of playing video at 50% brightness for 8-8.5 hours, which is slightly higher than the cheaper Lenovo S60 with its 6 hours, but lower than the more premium iPhone 6, which can last up to 10-11 hours in the same mode. In this regard, the review hero showed himself rather well than badly.
For emergencies, there is a power saving mode, in which the processor frequency is severely limited and the main set of functions is disabled. So you can extend the operating time of the device for another couple of hours.
Camera
Finally, the most interesting part of this device is the main camera. A 16-megapixel 1 / 2.3 ” matrix with laser autofocus and a backlight module is installed here. The Vibe Shot was also equipped with an f/2.2 lens with optical image stabilization. Videos can be recorded in Full HD resolution.
The camera application is quite easy to use: large icons, clear menus and well-designed interface do their job. In manual mode, which is activated by a switch on the right side of the smartphone, the main settings appear in the form of sliders, as in Microsoft Lumia 1020 and other models in the line. At the same time, the manual mode turns out to be not so manual, because, for example, it is impossible to control the aperture and manual focus here.
Pictures taken in good lighting conditions are obtained with high detail and contrast, autofocus works fine. Color reproduction is quite natural for a smartphone. From time to time, misfires occur when determining the white balance.
When shooting indoors, detail begins to be lost, and when the lighting deteriorates, you can completely forget about the details. In addition, autofocus often fails and no amount of laser focusing can fix it. Optical stabilization allows you to increase the shutter speed, but only up to 1/2, then when shooting handheld, there will be only movement. Under these conditions, I would rather put this camera next to Huawei P8 than LG G4 or Samsung Galaxy S6.
The front camera has a resolution of 8 MP and a similar manual mode. In addition, it has a skin smoothing mode and a frame-specific color fill function, which is useful for obtaining more natural skin tones when shooting in dim light. Interestingly, the presence of a panoramic mode for group selfies.