Lenovo launched the Vibe X2 smartphone in India last month for Rs. 19,999. The Successor of last year’s Vibe X smartphone has the same 5-inch 1080p display and a 13-megapixel rear camera, but this has a sleek design, uses a faster Octa-Core, comes with 4G LTE support and even comes with dual SIM support. Is the smartphone worth the price? Let us find out in the complete review.
Unboxing and Box Contents
We unboxed the Vibe X2 smartphone recently, check out the unboxing below.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUO1V1TCKsw
Box Contents
- Lenovo Vibe X2 smartphone in Gold
- 2-pin wall charger (1.5A)
- USB cable
- In-ear headset
- SIM ejector tool
- Screen protector
- Transparent protective case
- Quick Start Guide, Warranty card
Display, Hardware and Design
The 5-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels with 441 PPI is bright, the viewing angles are good and the sunlight legibility is good too, but it is highly glossy and is prone to fingerprints. The display has high sensitivity touch option that can be enabled from the display settings so that you can use the display even with gloves. It has Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection as well.
It has slim bezels on the sides of the display, making it a compact smartphone to hold with width of just 68.6mm. It is just 140.2mm tall, even though it has bezels above and below the display.
The 5-megapixel camera on the front can record videos at 1080p resolution. It has face beauty features (sale of 1 to 7), voice, timer, hand sign and Blink image capture options. There is an earpiece and the usual set of proximity and ambient light sensors on the top. It also has a tiny LED notification light below the camera, which is hardly visible when it’s off.
There are the usual set of menu, home and back capacitive touch buttons below the display. These are backlit and offer haptic feedback when pressed.
The Vibe X2 has a uni-body design and has unique layered design with three layers in different colors on the sides of the smartphone. It is just 7.27mm thick. It has a solid build quality, stylish design and weighs just 120 grams, making it one of the lightest smartphones with a 5-inch screen. The 3.5mm audio jack is present on the top and the micro USB slot is present on the bottom.
There is a small SIM card tray on the left side that can be opened using the bundled SIM ejector tool. The primary SIM is a micro SIM and the secondary SIM is a nano SIM. Both the SIM cards support 4G.
Lenovo has launched the Gold variant of the phone in India. The smartphone also comes in White, Red and Dark Grey color variants. There is a 13-megapixel camera on the back with LED flash and a secondary microphone.
There is a loudspeaker grill on the bottom part of the back along with pins next to it for Vibe Xtension click-on smart layer accessories.
Camera
The 13-megapixel rear camera with LED flash and f/2.2 aperture is not the best. The camera UI is simple with camera, flash and HDR toggles on the screen. Apart from the normal mode, there is Panorama mode and live Instagram-like effects. It has almost zero shutter delay, but it is really hard to focus something, especially for macro shots. Daylight shots are decent. Low-light shots are average and the flash offers ample amount of light. Overall it’s an average camera.
Check out some camera samples below (Click the image to view full resolution sample).
Daylight
Check out the complete set of Lenovo Vibe X2 samples here. It can record videos at 1080p full HD resolution at 30fps. Thanks to the secondary microphone, it supports stereo recording. Check out the 1080p video sample from the rear camera.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-dVo1zOa_U
Software
It runs on Android 4.4.2 (KitKat) with Vibe UI on top. You can customize the homescreen with widgets and folders. The notification toggles are customizable as well. Apart from the 14 toggles there are four additional toggles that can be swapped. You can also remove the brightness control bar if you wish.
There is a separate theme centre that lets you change the themes, wallpapers and lock screen. You can also change the bottom animation, system UI, contact manager, Notification UI and call UI. Other interesting built-in software option is Smart scene that lets you create scenes for different time period or places. For example you, can set the profile to silent at a particular time, turn off GPS when you connect to Home WiFi and more. You can create different scenes manually.
Out of 2GB RAM, about 1.2GB of RAM is free when the phone is idle with just system apps running in the background. Out of 32GB of internal storage you get 25.8 GB of usual storage since the OS takes up 5.65GB of space. The phone lacks a memory card slot, but this storage it more than enough if you are not going to install large games.
Apps
Coming to apps, the phone comes pre-installed with a lot of apps and games. Apart from the usual set of utility apps such as Calculator, Recorder, Clock, Compass and Google Apps, it comes pre-loaded with Evernote, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, UC Browser, Kingsoft Office, Truecaller and txtr ebooks.
Music Player and FM Radio
It can play a range of audio formats and it has FM Radio with RDS and recording. The loudspeaker output is good and the bundled in-ear earphones are decent. The video player can play 1080p videos smoothly.
Dual SIM and Connectivity
Both the SIMs support 4G, but you can enable 4G only in one SIM at a time. You can set the default SIM for voice call, messaging or data connection. It has a range of connectivity features that include, 4G (including current TD- LTE 2300MHz (Band 40) and upcoming FD-LTE 1800MHz (Band 3) for India), WiFi 802.11 b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS. It lacks NFC and USB OTG support. There were some SIM card bugs initially that caused frequent disconnection, but these were fixed in the bug fix update recently.
Performance and Benchmarks
It is powered by a Octa-Core MediaTek MT6595M processor which as four ARM Cortex-A17 cores clocked at 2GHz per core and four ARM Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.69GHz per core. Performance is just average with occasional lags in the UI since it consumes more RAM. Wish Lenovo offered stock Android option like it did for the Vibe Z2 Pro smartphone for a smooth UI. It got heated a bit when the phone was charging and on long voice calls. Check out some synthetic benchmark scores.
Quadrant Benchmark
It scored 24423 points in the Quadrant benchmark and lies behind the Snapdragon 805-powered Note 4.
AnTuTu Benchmark 4
It scored 44823 points in the AnTuTu Benchmark 4 and lies ahead of all the other smartphones.
Vellamo 2.0 HTML5
It scored 2291 points in the Vellamo 2 HTML5 browser benchmark and lies behind the Vibe Z. Check out the complete set of Lenovo Vibe X2 benchmarks here.
It has PowerVR 6200 GPU. We tested some high-end games on the smartphone. Both graphics and the performance were good. Overall it scored 4 out of 5 stars. Check out the gaming review below to know more about the gaming performance of the smartphone in detail.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5QOFi80n-I
Battery life
The 2300mAh built-in battery is below average. On full charge it lasts for less than a day on 3G with both the SIM cards on use. It might last less than that on 4G. It has power saver mode that reduces the screen and GPU power consumption, but the battery life doesn’t improve much even with power saver enabled. It also has ultimate power saver mode that enables only calling and messaging for several days of standby.
It achieved One Charge rating of just 6 hours and 44 minutes, which is not impressive. Lenovo should look to improve the battery life of the smartphone through software enhancement if it is possible. You can check out the detailed battery test results of the Vibe X2 here.
Conclusion
The Vibe X2 has a nice layered and sleek design, solid build quality, 4G connectivity that makes it definitely better than last year’s Vibe X. The camera quality is just average for a 13MP camera and the focus issues should be fixed. Finally the battery life is disappointing. There is a 2300mAh charging case for the smartphone that lets you extend the battery life. On the launch day the company offered the charging case for just Rs. 99, but now it costs Rs. 1,999. If you are looking to get the smartphone, the charging case is a must have accessory. If you can live with these disadvantages and can spend on the charging case for extra battery backup, go for it.
Pros
- Good display
- Good build quality
- 4G LTE support
Cons
- Average camera
- Occasional lags
- Battery life could be better