Lenovo Vibe X2 review

You’ve probably heard about ”Lenovo” in the mobile space more often since they bought Motorola. They made decent phones in the past but nothing that would stand out. Now there is this model that wants to be taken seriously. The Vibe series from Lenovo has phones that are slim, powerful and ultra-light. The combination isn’t easy but it looks like Lenovo has pulled it off.

The Lenovo Vibe X2 is the first multi-layered design phone in the world. Lenovo has picked a combination of flashy and subtle colours for the phone, tha catches eyeballs easily.. The phone wasn’t very comfortable to use-- the edges made their presence felt when in hand. The main problem crops up when you are on a call as the edge of the phone digs into the palm, making it uncomfortable to use for long calls. I found myself switching hands constantly between calls. A slightly curvier design would have been better. If you talk on your phones for hours then this phone may not be really comfortable to use.

This is a 4G Dual SIM device but there is only one SIM tray that accommodates both the MicroSIM and a NanoSIM card. It sports a 5 inch Full HD IPS display which was a little saturated, it has a high pixel density of 441ppi and is nice to look at. The display is protected by Gorilla Glass 3 and comes with a scratch guard in the box. The display does, however,get scratched very easily and I’d recommend buyers to apply the screen guard for added measure.

Sound quality is decent with bundled headphones; the speakerphone is loud enough, the plastic body does rumble a bit when blasting audio really loud. The 32GB onboard storage gave me about 22GB of user available space and the rest was eaten up by the OS.

The phone comes with Android 4.4 KitKat and runs VIBE UI on top of it. There has been some tweaks and performance updates in the UI since the original Vibe. There is still no app drawer and all the apps are available directly on the home screen. If you don’t like the whole layout you can use the Google Now Launcher. The best thing is that you have a list of all the useful features at one place in the Settings menu. The Vibe X2 comes with interesting features like Smart Answer, which immediately answers a call when the device is raised to your ear. Pocket Mode increases the ringtone volume when the phone is in a pocket or purse and the pocket-dial prevention mode prevents accidental clicks too. Smart Standby prevents the display from going off if you’re looking at it. Double-tapping the home button wakes the phone, launches the camera and takes a picture. You can also double-tap the screen to check notifications.

The Lenovo Vibe X2 has a 13MP camera at the back and a 5MP camera at the front. The primary camera clicks good shots in the broad daylight, HDR mode needs a steady hand to prevent ghosting. Putting the camera in Sports Mode would eliminate the lag in the viewfinder and click images faster.

At night, the camera on the X2 may feel like a handful. The images clicked would turn out to be shaky and unusable. The slow shutter speed of the camera is evident and it makes it tough to get a good shot at night. Add to that the absence of image stabilisation makes it harder to click good images. Video capturing is at 1080p but it isn’t the best out there. The camera takes its own sweet time to focus and refocus, resulting in a video you’d rather delete.

The Vibe X2's modest 5MP front camera records at 1080p and comes loaded with features like blink shutter, hand and voice shutter trigger. Overall, I'd not recommend the Vibe X2 if you want a good camera phone. I'd say this is a killer phone for its performance but in camera department, it is just as good as Moto G.

The phone packs in an Octa core processor with 2GB of RAM., it's a Mediatek Chipset and has 4 high performance cores [Cortex A 17] and 4 energy efficient cores [Cortex A7], and when in need, all 8 can work simultaneously. The processing power that this phone has is mind boggling. If you’re into synthetic benchmarks, you’ll be glad to know that the Vibe X2 puts powerful phones like the Nexus 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S5 to shame. There was no lag in the UI. Gaming wasn’t a problem either, it ran high-end games smoothly and the loud speaker ensured that it was engaging.        

With all this processing power, you’d ask how badly it hit on the battery life. The phone sips battery frugally when idle, thanks to the low power cores. But the battery doesn’t hold up really well under heavy use. The high performance cores drain the battery fast, slightly heating the phone up in the process. We found the phone to heat up while playing heavy games and video recording. Once the device heats up I saw a minor drop in performance and had to wait for the device to cool down.

Looking at the specs of the Vibe X2, I thought it was the perfect all rounder for Rs 20,000. In terms of pure performance the device is amazing and can outperform devices that cost a lot more. The camera clicks good images but isn’t the best one out there. So if you are looking for a phone that is an excellent performer the Vibe X2 doesn’t fail to impress. For those who want more, you can go for the recently launched Xiaomi Mi 4 or the OnePlus One.