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Lenovo Vibe Shot Review, Great Camera, Awesome Form Factor

When we talk about the smartphone manufacturing leaders, Lenovo is the name that came out with a lot of impressive devices and shook a lot of top-end smartphone manufacturers in India. Lenovo is trying hard to rise up its market value for quite some time, but the last two years, it is making efforts in taking a larger cut of the smartphone market and has turned better at making an impression.

 [stbpro id=”alert”] Also Read: Lenovo Vibe Shot 16MP Camera Review [/stbpro]

Most of the smartphones offered by Lenovo feature great batteries and the high-end handsets never miss on the camera quality. There most recent attempt Lenovo Vibe Shot has left us impressed in many ways.

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The new Lenovo Vibe Shot carries tremendous camera and mighty configuration; it is a beautifully crafted and great looking phone. This is a costly phone with great capabilities and stunning looks, here is the detailed review of Vibe Shot.

Lenovo VIbe Shot Quick Specs

  • Display Size:5 Inch IPS LCD Display with 1080p Full HD Resolution
  • Processor:7 GHz Octa Core Qualcomm MSM8939 Snapdragon 615 with Quad core 1.7 GHz Cortex A53 and quad core 1.0 GHz Cortex A53, Adreno 406
  • RAM:3 GB
  • Software Version:Android 5.0 Lollipop based Vibe UI
  • Camera:16 MP rear camera, OIS, 1080p Video recording
  • Secondary Camera:8 MP, 1080p Video recording
  • Internal Storage: 32 GB
  • External Storage:128 GB MicroSD support
  • Battery:2900 mAh, Non Removable
  • Connectivity: 3G/4G LTE, HSPA+, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP, GPS, Dual SIM
  • Phone Dimensions:3 x 76.5 x 7.9 mm
  • Phone Weight:150 g
  • Others: Dual SIM – Yes, USB OTG – Yes, LED Indicator – Yes

Lenovo Vibe Shot India Unboxing, Review and Everything You Need To Know [Video]


Vibe Shot User Interface

Lenovo Vibe Shot runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop with Vibe UI 3.1 on top of it. This time the developers deserve a round of applause for the added simplicity and functionality. The notification area, in-app menus and home screen are well designed and the user experience on this device is great any day.


Lenovo gives tons of fancy features and customization to make the UI look pleasant like most of its devices. The home-screen can be customized with multiple themes, wallpapers, icons, widgets, animations and screen lock styles. The notification area has been tweaked for better accessibility; it gives us easier access to the quick settings and notifications. The animations and transitions are perfectly handled by the GPU on this device.

Overall, using this phone for long was not boring, neither the interface was dull. This phone offers a lot of customization options under the settings menu. You can add a floating button called ‘wide touch’ which works just like Apple’s assistive touches. It makes the device more users friendly and hassle-free to use.

Design and Display

Vibe Shot has a lot to offer when it comes to design. This phone has a premium finish and high quality material used all around the body. Lenovo has used the anodized aluminum frame with chamfered edges to cover the sides on the phone.

The front and back of the phone are made with well finished glass, which makes it shine from every possible angle. The front and the back of the phone act as fingerprint magnet, though they can be used as a mirror too. The front of this phone looks great by the way; it carries the speaker, along with the 8 MP front camera. Capacitive back lid navigation buttons are located at the bottom of the front panel. The bezels on the sides are reasonable, but the bezels on the top and bottom cover a thick area; it makes the phone look taller than the average 5 inch handsets.

The design on the back panel is inspired by an old-school professional camera. When you hold the device horizontally you will see a broad gray coloured strip that looks like brushed aluminum. The Lenovo Vibe logo can be found on the bottom left and on the top left, you will find the 16 MP camera along with the triple LED flash under which, lies the IR blaster to help the camera work effectively in dim-light conditions.

On the left side, there is the microSD expansion slot and the SIM slot with a lanyard loop at the bottom left corner.

The volume rocker, power/lock button, shutter button and the auto/manual camera switch is located on the right side of the phone. The button placement is done in such a way that when you hold the device in landscape orientation for shooting, it will feel like a camera, just like the modern point and shoot.

The bottom holds the micro USB port lying in between the loudspeaker grill. On the top there is a 3.5mm audio jack.

The display is just flawless offering high contrast, excellent viewing angles. The color accuracy will suit almost every average user and the eye will not spot any strain, I personally loved the display. There are several customization options available in the display setting which allow you to adjust the display colour balance according to your convenience.

Lenovo Vibe Shot Photo Gallery

Performance and Heating

The Vibe Shot is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm MSM8939 or Snapdragon 615 processor. Four Cortex-A53 cores run at 1.7GHz and the rest four Cortex-A53 run at 1.0 GHz. Lenovo has paired the Soc with ample of RAM to perform multitasking, t RAM available is 3GB and the GPU used in the device is the usual Adreno 405 ticking at 550 MHz.

Lenovo has done a really great job with the premium design of this device, but the SoC available on this device is not the one used in phones with this quality. The Snapdragon 615 processor is mostly used in mid-range smartphones. Lenovo must have compromised with this to keep up the low-cost production as Lenovo Vibe Shot is not their flagship device.

Don’t make early assumptions with this, as the phone performs really smooth, fast and snappy while playing games, using apps or multitasking. You will not notice any hangs or lags in doing the basic tasks until you are a power user.

Games like NOVA 3 ran effortlessly, but when you play continuously with the apps running in background, the Vibe Shot lagged when a lot of action was on the screen. We also have to note that while the Vibe Shot got warm when used continuously, but it never got uncomfortably hot and it was not an abnormal heating.

Benchmark Scores

Benchmark Standard Score
Quadrant 24173
Antutu 40671
Nenamark 2 58.5 fps

Camera

The camera of the Lenovo Vibe Shot is actual highlight of this device. The phone is designed like a camera and aims to offer camera like feel in this smartphone. The main camera uses 16 MP sensor (5328 x 2997) with Optical Image Stabilization, triple-LED flash and IR laser.

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The colour reproduction is good, details produced were crisp and clear, no sign of grains or noise in the natural lighting. Capturing moments in good lighting conditions is a treat with this camera. The triple-LED flash helps getting better portraits in the dark by adjusting the amount of warmth. The OIS performs decently, aided with the IR blaster to focus aptly under low light conditions. Rich selection of manual shooting options help improving the camera performance under the low light scenario.

The autofocus is fast and snappy, and the camera UI is nicely designed. The UI contains numerous great features that the competitos in the same range do not have. The Quick snap feature available on this device allows you to click a picture even when the phone is locked. Double tap the dedicated camera shutter and click a picture instantly. There are plenty of shooting modes available in the camera settings. If you really have a heart for photography, you may find this camera quite interesting to play with.

The front snapper is 8 MP and performs convincingly sound, it can record video upto 1080p resolution. If you ask me about it, this is not something I expected from a camera centric phone priced at 25k.

Camera Samples

 [stbpro id=”download”] Recommended: Lenovo Vibe Shot FAQ, Pros, Cons [/stbpro]

Battery Life, Drop Rate and Free Storage

The Vibe Shot is lit up by a 2900 mAh battery fitted inside the thin casing, which is just about 7.3mm. This capacity is enough to run a 5 inch display and handle the power efficient Snapdragon 615 SoC. We expected some good results and the power backup proved to be more than enough for the system during the initial testing. We ran a few battery tests on this device and it just passed all of them with an impressive result.

Full HD video (Wi-Fi turned on/full brightness and volume) – Initial battery 18% and after 20 minutes -12%

Gaming -Nova 3 (Wi-Fi turned on/full volume and brightness) – Initial battery 25% after 15 minutes – 19%

Internal storage is 32 GB, out of which around 25 GB is available for apps and media. This is a good storage capacity for a phone of this range and has an option of expansion up to 128 GB, which is quite a lot to store the high quality images on this phone.

Verdict

I’m obsessed with the quality of design of this phone; it just feels really premium to hold in your hands and looks charming. Looking at the specs, one may feel like it is more of a camera than a phone, but let me tell you, this phone performs equally well. The battery backup is also good, but the only thing that I found is not reasonably settled is the price. It is an 25000 INR phone, which is good but still not great to have this price tag.

You can find other smartphones of the same price range; you may find them more interesting than this one. If you want a stylish phone with great daylight camera performance, you can consider this for once.

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Abhishek Bhatnagar

Abhishek Bhatnagar, a known technology blogger & YouTuber from India. A Software Engineer by qualification, now he works as the editor-In-Chief, Webmaster, & Managing Director at Gadgets To Use. He runs a number of other technology websites as well.