Lenovo Vibe P1 Turbo Review [A Battery Powerhouse]

Lenovo, a Chinese multinational company has quite a reputation when it comes to laptops. Also, they produce budget smartphones and also acquire Motorola. Lenovo smartphone is definitely not so popular in Nepali market. They do have some good budget phones but they are yet to establish themselves in Nepali market. Lenovo by Lifecom is the official distributor of Lenovo phones in Nepal and recently hey have been releasing quite a few phones.

Among those, Lenovo Vibe P1 Turbo is a budget phone which carries a humongous 4900mAh battery. But it has older chipset and specifications in contrast to other budget phones.

Lenovo Vibe P1 Turbo Review

DESIGN

Vibe P1 Turbo is a huge device and has a similar design as of other phones from the Vibe series. Mostly it has a metal body but the top section and the bottom section are made of plastic. The phone is quite thick and large as it measures 152.9 x 75.6 x 9.9 mm. The top section of this phone is removable and it houses a micro SD slot and a dual sim slot. The good thing about this is we can use both sim cards and the memory card at the same time as it is not a hybrid slot.

On the bottom, we can find a speaker and a USB port. As usual, it sports a 13 MP primary camera on the back along with Lenovo branding. And, flaunts a 5 MP front camera and sensor on the front. The volume rocker and the power buttons are located on the right. Likewise, it has a dedicated power saving mode button on the left which is totally not required.

The build quality of this phone is really impressive. It is large and bulky but it gives you a premium feel when you’re using the phone. Though one hand usage is not comfortable due to its size.

DISPLAY

The 5.5 inches 1080p display of the Lenovo Vibe P1 turbo looks decent and with a pixel density of 401ppi the screen is plenty bright. But the color reproduction lacks depth and the colors look muted and cool. I did not like the color accuracy of this phone and the color reproduction feels really washed off which is certainly not pleasing. There’s a Display Color Balance setting where we can switch to comfort mode and bright mode. Interestingly the brightness level of this phone is very good as I was easily able to use the phone under direct sunlight. On overall the display is good but the muted color profile of the display is what makes it unpleasing.

HARDWARE & PERFORMANCE

This phone certainly doesn’t have the best spec sheet as it uses an old Snapdragon 616 chipset with an octa-core processor and Adreno 405 GPU. The phone performs quite well when web browsing and running various apps. But I did notice a bug where the screen would go all white. And I would have to lock and again unlock to get rid of the white screen. Besides this, the phone was pretty smooth during multitasking and switching between multiple apps was a breeze.

Talking about its gaming performance it ran all the heavy games like NOVA Legacy, Asphalt and Implosion without any lags. But, it was not the smoothest experience. I used the coolpad cool 1 for more than a week and in comparison, Lenovo Vibe P1’s performance is much inferior. This does not mean Vibe P1’s performance is bad but it’s certainly not the best among the budget phones.

Lenovo Vibe P1 Turbo comes with 32 GB of internal storage and 3 GB of RAM. This storage configuration is adequate for normal users but if you like to store media contents on your phone you’ll definitely need a micro sd card. It supports 802.11 Dual Band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v4.1 and USB OTG with micro USB v2.0. We didn’t encounter any problem regarding Wi-Fi, USB or Bluetooth during the testing period.

The speaker on this phone is loud that most of the budget phones I’ve used but the sound gets too flat at the highest volume. I would definitely not want to listen to these speakers at the highest volume.

The home button works as the fingerprint and the fingerprint was not consistent. Sometimes it took more than two tries to unlock the phone though the unlock is quite fast.

Lenovo Vibe P1 Turbo Key Specifications

• Display – 5.5 inches FHD IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with Corning Gorilla Class 3 protection
• Chipset – Qualcomm MSM8939 v2 Snapdragon 616
• CPU – Octa-core (4×1.6 GHz Cortex-A53 & 4×1.2 GHz Cortex-A53)
• GPU – Adreno 405
• Memory – 32GB internal storage with microSD expandable storage(up to 256GB), 3GB RAM
• OS – Andriod 5.1 Lollipop
• Primary Camera – 13 MP, f/2.2, phase detection autofocus, dual-tone dual LED flash
• Secondary Camera – 5Mp, f/2.8
• Battery – Non-removable Li-Ion 4900 mAh battery
• Sensors – Fingerprint (front-mounted), accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass
  

Lenovo Vibe P1 Turbo Price in Nepal: Rs. 28,000

BATTERY

Alright, I will just go ahead and say that battery is the only thing that makes me want to buy this phone. The 4900 mAH battery of this phone is more than enough and it lasted almost 2 days under moderate usage. I had a very hard time finishing the phone’s battery, I had to use it extensively to finish its battery under a single day. With my normal usage, the phone still had 50% percent of battery left after a day. If you’re a power hungry user this phone could do you wonders but you’ll have to settle on certain departments.

CAMERA

The 13 MP rear camera of this phone is certainly an average camera. The camera does a good job under well-lit environment. The colors are nice and it is not too saturated. Though it is inconsistent as the colors appear a little muted sometimes. The HDR mode can handle this issue quite well but obviously taking pictures with HDR mode requires much more time and precision. Pictures in outdoor conditions are decent but same is not the case indoors, you can easily notice digital noise in the indoor images.

SEE ALSO: Lenovo Mobiles Price List in Nepal 

I compared it to the Coolpad cool1 and it seems it has much more warm color than the Coolpad but the images contain much more digital noise.

In the case of videos, it is same as the images and it does not support 4k recording. There is no image stabilization so videos are shaky but the video recording is decent. Though I was impressed with the audio quality of the videos.

The front facing 5 MP camera is nothing special. It manages to capture a decent picture in a well-lit environment but suffers heavily in low-light conditions or indoors.

SOFTWARE

Lenovo Vibe P1 Turbo runs on Android marshmallow version 6.0.1 with the VIBE UI. VIBE UI is like most of the ROM’s from Chinese vendors though there are not much bloatware included in VIBE UI. Obviously, there is no app drawer and if you prefer stock Android you have an option to change the theme to Android. This does not provide us the total Android experience though. We’ll just get the app drawer and nothing else much changes, not even the icons.

There are some useful features like quick snap, double tap to wake, flip to sleep and fingerprint gestures.

On the overall, the VIBE UI is quite simple and does not provide much customization option.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Clearly, this phone is a beast when it comes to battery life but it kind of fades away when it comes to performance and camera. With average camera and performance, I would not use this phone if I wanted a phone with a good camera. For the price tag of Rs. 28,000 the camera is just average, rather Coolpad Cool1 and Huawei’s GR5 could be a better option.

Also, this phone is aesthetically not pleasing and it is bulky for a 5.5-inch display phone. Though it has a very good build quality. At last, if you are a power user and you do not care much about the camera this is a very good phone.