Lenovo Z5

Lenovo Z5 arrives as a mid-range marvel to satisfy all the desires of a mid-range crowd. Priced at ₹14700, Lenovo Z5 tries to keep all its aspects optimised to a mid-tier quality without taking a step outside its mid-range comfort zone.

Lenovo tries to go for balance rather than flagship features. It has a wonderful processor paired with a decent battery, and it comes with a surprisingly good camera with fantastic portrait mode. It is for people looking for all aspects of their phone without going for one spectacular feature.

The Lenovo Z5 is a handy phone. It comes with a width of 26.17mm which makes it easy to manage the phone. It comes with minimal 3.7mm bezel curved at the edges like an R. The chin is also quite sleek giving a lot of screen space to work with. The front and rear panels are covered with Corning Gorilla Glass which makes it smooth and bright, as well as reflective. The metal frame in the middle curves into a transition to the sides. Due to its small body, it is quite easy to handle in one hand. At the bottom, it arrives with the 3.5mm audio jack and USB Type-C interface, which makes it quite modern.

Lenovo Z5 has a 6.2-inch screen with an unusual 2246×1080 resolution which is displayed through the 18:7:9 aspect ratio. It has a wide colour gamut and is referred to as Full-Color screen. The colours are clear and not very aggressive. The pictures remain strong and pleasant. The sunlight legibility is ok, but it’s not very effective due to the soft colours. However, it does not have an AMOLED screen so don’t expect the deeper black of AMOLED screens.

The Lenovo Z5 has the same Snapdragon 636 chipset that comes in Xiaomi Redmi Note 5. It is a lower version of the Snapdragon 660. This octa-core processor is clocked at 1.8GHz and provides a 40% better performance than the Snapdragon 630. It is a mid-tier performer and acts that way. The phone can be used for multitasking without a problem but pushing too many heavy apps may result in a slow down. Light games can run easily, but the performance may falter with heavy games. It gets a decent 115982 benchmark score which makes it quite a fast performance in the price range.

The Lenovo Z5 has a 16MP camera with the 8MP secondary camera. It comes with Auto HDR which work great and produces brilliant photos. When there is adequate daylight, the images come out quite detailed. The secondary camera is used for clicking quality portrait shots. Generally, the portrait shots of phones in this range turn out to be poor, but Z5’s portraits turn out to be quite decent.

In low light, the camera falters a bit capturing visual noise, and there is a bit of blurring of the background.

The portrait mode has good edge detection and comes out with a decent photo with the subjects popping outside the blurred background.

The 8MP selfie camera in the front is also decent and produces social media worthy photos. However, it can falter in low-lights.

The Lenovo Z5 has a 3300mAh battery which according to the company claims could give a one-day battery life. However, when an HD movie running at full brightness and 80% volume was used, the phone lasted for 6 hours. It is not the best score but promises the one-day runtime that the company had claimed. Heavy games can start draining the battery much faster getting you about 6 hours of gameplay.

Lenovo Z5 turns out to be a great handset when it is compared to its competitor, Xiaomi Redmi Note 5. While the camera on the phone is good but when it comes to photo quality Moto G6 Plus performs better. For Z5, the best feature is its balance – it has a good display and great processing speed for the price range. It is quite a capable mid-range phone. However, you can opt for the Redmi Note 5 if you are looking for a better battery or the Moto G6 for good quality cameras.