Lenovo K900 unboxed, first impression review

We’ve had several encounters with the Lenovo K900 before and now that it has been officially released in the Philippines, we immediately purchased a unit so we can do a review here on YugaTech.

The combination of polished aluminum and solid glass is what got us attracted with the Lenovo K900. It has almost the same materials used as the equally gorgeous HTC One.

At 5.5 inches, we thought the K900 would be unwieldy for single-handed operation but that really depends on the size of your hands. In our case, we found that making calls is still doable with one hand while composing text messages will require both hands.

Although the K900 sports a seemingly unibody design, the back plate is actually removable once you unscrew the four (4) hexalobular socket screw drive (we think you’d void the warranty if you try to open it though).

While the entire front panel is mostly covered with glass and protected around the edges by a metal shell, the back side is covered by two distinct aluminum alloy — the base chassis is slightly darker, more polished and has a soft matte finish while the battery plate has a brushed metal look and lighter hue.

The large Lenovo logo is carved into the backplate, the speaker grills are at the bottom end while the camera and dual-LED flash is found at the top end.

The handset is very thin, among the thinnest we’ve ever seen in any handset we’ve reviewed and it’s short of sexy.

The power button is situated on the right side of the handset along with the micro-SIM card slot (comes with a pin to po-up the slot) while the volume controls are on the left side.

At the bottom end, the micro-USB port and 3.5mm headphone jack are both found along with the microphone. A secondary noise-canceling mic is found on the back side, near the LED flash.

Since there’s no microSD card slot for storage expansion, the K900 supports USB On-the-go. If there’s one thing that most people would look at as a deal-breaker for the K900, it would be the lack of expandable microSD card slot.

Having used a number of Lenovo smartphones before, we’ve notice how their custom UI has improved over time.

The native icons are circular and even the app drawer will scroll thru the app list even if you swipe vertically or horizontally (a simple UX tweak that makes a lot of sense).

There are also a number of usability and power management features added into the system by Lenovo.

Although there are only two (2) physical CPU cores on the K900, each core can simultaneously run 2 threads which helps make the device perform like it has 4 virtual cores.

Lenovo K900 specs:
5.5-inch IPS LCD display @ 1080 x 1920 pixels, 401 ppi
Corning Gorilla Glass 2
Intel Atom Z2580 2.0GHz dual-core CPU
PowerVR SGX544
2GB RAM
16GB internal storage
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, dual-band
Bluetooth 3.0
13 MP camera w/ dual LED flash
1080p video capture
2MP front-facing camera
GPS w/ aGPS support
Android 4.2 Jellybean
Li-Po 2500mAh battery
157 x 78 x 6.9 mm (dimensions)
162 grams (weight)

As such we’re seeing really good benchmarks scores for the K900 — 6,051 for Quadrant, 21,205 for Antutu Benchmark and 59.9fps on NenaMark 2 — results are pretty much similar or close to the Xperia Tablet Z. These are really good scores considering the K900 is only running on 2 cores.

The Lenovo K900 is now available in local stores for a suggested retail price of Php22,990USD 392INR 33,211EUR 373CNY 2,853 although they were having a promo earlier where you cna have it for Php21,990USD 375INR 31,767EUR 357CNY 2,729 on cash or straight charge. Watch out for our full review soon.