It seems like brands have begun settling in the mid-range tribe as most of the market players have proven its effectiveness in reaching out to consumers. Lenovo, a Chinese computer and smartphone company, has obviously realized the exact same thing.
Following up to the K series is the Lenovo K8 ? a mid-range smartphone that doubles some of the most important aspects of its predecessor, the K6 Note.
Design
The obvious tweak in K8 is its thicker physique. Holding the K6 Note and K8 in each hand, you would instantly notice how the latter beefed up its body. Of course, thicker body means more weight ? weighing 11 grams more than the K6 Note. Nevertheless, the K8 feels more premium to hold and adjusting wouldn’t be that hard.
The right edge mounts the volume key and power/lock key with a grilled texture that shouldn’t mean anything. If there’s anything we would like to ask Lenovo, that would be the reason behind this texture.
Meanwhile, the other side of the K8 Note houses two autonomous sockets for storage expansion and your two SIM cards. This edge also has the media button etched with “play and pause” icons that actually does useful functions.
Originally installed to control your music, the multimedia key’s function could also be modified to start your preferred app, switch on the flashlight, take a screenshot, and open the camera.
Occupying the front panel’s bottom row are the navigation keys. Just like its older brother, they don’t light up and this will matter when you’re in the dark. They are joined by the micro-USB port and stereo speakers at the foot, with the 3.5mm port placed on the rooftop.
Lastly, the K8 Note’s biggest leap from its past version would be the dual-camera setup. It is the most crucial part of this handset’s overall design as this shooter brings the elegant image for a mid-range smartphone. Right below the dual camera is the fingerprint sensor placed in a practical height even for short-fingered users.
Performance
Although we got the 32GB-3GB (internal memory-RAM) K8 Note instead of the 64GB-4GB variation, we had a steady experience with Lenovo’s latest mid-ranger. It has a new and faster chip in addition to the phone’s deca-core CPU.
Before serving you the benchmark results, we’d like to mention that the K8 Note is equipped with an Android 7.1.1 Nougat version.
Moving forward, the Lenovo K8 Note uses a 1080 x 1920 resolution across its 5.5-inch IPS LCD panel. Watching colorful videos was a pleasure in this smartphone as the screen produced vivid and sharp images. It is armed with Corning Gorilla Glass 3.
While the K8 Note houses a 4,000mAh battery, we felt like it drained faster than we expected and the faster chips and added cores to the CPU have something to do with it. Thanks to its 15-watt fast charger, refueling it back won’t be that bad.
Dubbed by the company as “deca-core smartphone for photography,” the K8 Note showed decent performance in shooting photographs and selfies using its primary 13- and 5-megapixel dual camera with f/1.7 aperture, and the 13-megapixel dual-camera. To show more of it, here are the following photos we captured:
In this particular test, we took photos indoors to challenge K8 Note’s camera and as you can see, it did pretty well without the sun.
Conclusion
One of the cheapest dual-cam Full HD smartphone, the Lenovo K8 Note can be a strong option to skeptics who fear putting their money to a pricey flagship smartphone. It has the potential to live up its “Killer Smartphone” monicker as it directly aims its arms at other brands’ flagships.
Initially priced at P13,999, this smartphone is now priced at P8,999 at Lazada.
The Good
- Inexpensive price tag
- Dual-camera setup
- Turbo charging
The Bad
- Battery drains faster than we expected
- Navigation keys are not lit
