Lenovo announced the A6000 smartphone a few weeks back at CES 2015 in Las Vegas. The company had talked about its partnership with Flipkart back then, which was intriguing, as that would mean that the product is aimed at India. Well, turns out that the speculations were correct, since Lenovo launched the device in India today, opting for the flash sale model, same as Xiaomi and now even Micromax's Yu brand. The smartphone is up for registration from today (16 January) and will go up for its first sale on 28 January. We were at the launch event and here are our first impressions of the device.
At Rs. 6,999, the A6000 is the cheapest 4G LTE capable smartphone in India right now. Of course, competitors are expected from Xiaomi, Motorola and others, but we were quite impressed with this device. It will sell through the flash sale model though, so let's hope Lenovo can bring bigger numbers than Xiaomi and Yu, considering that it's a much bigger company.
Build and Design
The build quality of the Lenovo A6000 is quite good. In fact, the device looks and feels much better than any other of its competitors. The somewhat metallic feel to the back and comparatively slim profile makes it feel very premium and perhaps the best looking smartphone in the budget range. It's 8.2 mm thick and weighs 128 grams.
Display
The 5 inch 720p display gets a lot of colour from Lenovo's Vibe UI. The display seemed vibrant and quite sharp on first impressions. We were quite impressed by the display quality on this smartphone.
Removable Battery
Most smartphone users would consider this a pro. The Lenovo A6000 allows the user to remove the back and battery from the smartphone, which is often a godsend in certain sticky situations, where you absolutely need to perform a soft reset.
Cameras
While an 8MP rear and 2MP front camera don't sound very bad for a sub-7k smartphone, launch events never offer the right conditions to judge them. On paper, they sound good enough, but we'll hold our judgements till a complete review.
Performance
Inside, the Lenovo A6000 runs on a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon 410 quad-core 64-bit SoC along with 1GB of RAM and Vibe UI 2.0 layered on Android 4.4.4 KitKat. The UI seemed quite snappy on the demo devices at the launch and we didn't notice any lags or crashes in the little time we had with it.
Overall
On first impressions, the Lenovo A6000 is a very impressive smartphone that has piqued our interest. We will be reviewing this one thoroughly to see if there are any chinks in its armour. Currently, it looks quite good and seems poised to be a formidable competitor for the likes of Xiaomi and Motorola. Also, it appears much better than the Tizen-powered Samsung Z1, even with the higher price tag.