Lenovo A5

With the likes of Xiaomi and Reame already ruling the roost and taking advantage of the budget segment of smartphones, Lenovo decided to throw in the gauntlet with their venture into this particular segment in an attempt to loosen the hold of the aforementioned competition. With the 2GB RAM variant priced at Rs 5,999 and the 3GB one priced at Rs 6,999, the phone shall become exclusively available on Flipkart from November 1st onwards.

If you’ve been an ardent user of Lenovo phones and are operating under a budget, this phone could bring good value to you on the table. With its assortment of good features all across the board, Lenovo A5 is a pretty solid release and can make for a great purchase for those who aren’t looking for anything spectacular and just need a device that’ll perform specific, prosaic tasks effectively.

Quite comfortable to hold, Lenovo A5 consists of a plastic back and metal frame. It has a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and its round edges mean that it remains both ergonomically and aesthetically pleasing. The phone has a dual SIM slot on the right side, with all the other standard buttons in place. The phone has a fingerprint sensor as well at the back, which works quite decently although it is sort of sluggish.

On paper, the device features a 5.45-inch HD+ IPS LCD display with 720 x 1440 pixels resolution, and a full-screen display with an 18:9 aspect ratio. Within its price range, Lenovo A5 brings pretty good value on the table although people who love to watch movies on their phones might be underwhelmed since outdoor visibility is a bit on the average side. The touch responsiveness is pretty good, however.

In terms of how efficient the phone really is when putting to the task, Lenovo A5 is powered by a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6739 processor coupled with 2GB/3GB of RAM. There is 16GB/32GB internal storage and offers a microSD card of up to 256GB. The chipset used, as stated earlier, is actually pretty basic and one mustn’t expect this phone to take on the heavy applications more powerful processors can handle. The phone can multi-task and transition between apps pretty comfortably, and the time it took to launch each application was pretty less, just taking around 1-2 seconds. It might experience some heating issues though if one runs rather heavy applications on it. All in all, though, it does what it is expected to do in its price range.

On paper, Lenovo A5 features a single 13-megapixel rear sensor with LED flash, an f/2.2 aperture that captures sharp and detailed photographs while the front shooter features an 8-megapixel camera for selfies and video calling with f/2.2 aperture. It is equipped with most standard features, like face detection, but will perform quite averagely given that it’s mostly a rear shooter, equipped with a 1080p video support, while the front camera is equipped with 720p.

In outdoor or low-lit settings, the phone will not perform spectacularly but will mostly do the job. As a result, the photos might not come out very detailed.

Although the phone is equipped with a massive 4000mAh battery and should hold up pretty comfortably even if it is used heavily throughout the day, the phone’s achilles heel is charging up the phone itself. It is not equipped with fast-charging capabilities and so will take a good 3 to 4 hours to charge up to full. 

While it might lack in performance owing to its old chipset, Lenovo A5 is a pretty solid offering given the fact that it comes with Android 8.1 Oreo, good display and pretty great battery life. If one is looking for a budget phone, Lenovo A5 is a pretty nice option to tinker with.