Lenovo Vibe X: A media power house with a gorgeous display

At its rather affordable price point, the Lenovo Vibe X offers a lot of features. While we have already looked at its premium build quality, the fairly generous specification sheet and the exclusive apps that enhance productivity, Lenovo has made the Vibe X with the term “all-rounder” in mind. And for this all-rounder, this time around, we look at the multimedia features. And the experience that revolves around consuming media on the Vibe X, be it audio or video.

Excellent display quality 

First up, we look at the hardware that drives that experience. The most critical part is the display, which needs to be able to replicate visual content in a way that it is actually supposed to look like. The 5-inch IPS screen has a 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution and a rated density of 440ppi. Lenovo says that it is the 20/20 vision, pretty much like how Apple treats the Retina display on the iPhone, and offers excellent text crispness and extremely accurate colour reproduction. The IPS panel itself has a massive advantage over the rival display technologies like AMOLED and LCD, in terms of how accurate and rich the colours look on the screen, with an additional boost provided by the better viewing angles. The screen gets a Gorilla Glass 3 protection as well, which is something that stands out, as most phones in this price bracket have not upgraded to the latest Gorilla Glass hardware. The curved glass design is supposed to reduce reflections that tend to have a rather annoying presence on most smartphone screens in most usage environments.

First up, we ran a series of 1080p videos on the device. The playback was smooth, and jumping within the timeline didn’t throw up any commonly experienced problems (in many phones in this price bracket) like video playback stutter, AV out of sync or worse case scenario – frozen application; thanks to the quad-core 1.5GHz MTK processor paired with 2GB of RAM. To put this into perspective, even most laptops can not skip between the timelines of a 1080p video without stuttering.

Even after playing back HD content for an hour, the Vibe X didn’t give any indications of stress, and neither did it get hot. Again, not many phones in the same price band can claim to do that.

The display is absolutely fantastic. At auto brightness levels, the phone itself takes care of how bright the screen should be. If you are watching a video with the lights turned off, but want greater brightness, we found that around 70% is where the display hits the sweet spot. Viewing angles are very good, because the reflections are taken care of, the colours look fantastic and fast motion scenes are fairly smooth. Quite frankly, while AMOLED fans may tell you that colours look richer on their phone’s screen, nothing beats the combination of accuracy and richness that this IPS panel offers.

Music playback and file support

Lenovo has preloaded the Vibe X with a rather neat File Manager application, called File Browser which comes with a tabbed interface – Internal Storage and Category. The primary category shows the root folder structure. The secondary category tags the files and places them in separate categories, popular ones like Apps, Music, Videos, Pics, Docs and Recent Files. Within the file types themselves, you can sort by formats. For example, in the music folder, you can sort via the following – MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, MID, AMR etc. If you cannot find a file within the dedicated app for some reason, or just want to see all the data on the phone in one place, this File Manager application is the one to go for.

For music playback, the Vibe X uses the Google Play Music application. You can transfer music from your PC or download it from a synced cloud storage on to your device’s memory, and the Play Music application will pick it up.

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