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Lenovo A5 - Not Even a Hundred! (now with coupon discount)

Lenovo A5 - Not Even a Hundred! (now with coupon discount)

Recently, Lenovo has relatively little to say about you, but after A5, it's easy to get back to focus!

Lenovo A5 - Not Even a Hundred! (now with coupon discount)

Introductory

Surely not only with us, but also with our Readers who are familiar with the world of smartphones, it often happens that when browsing between entry-level devices, they sometimes get their heads up. The thing (mostly) can be attributed to the fact that the pace of development is amazing without exaggeration, which a few years ago was only the privilege of shoppers with really thick wallets, now available to anyone. By the way, these thoughts popped out of our heads exactly when we first saw the key parameters of the Lenovo A5. And then let us continue this reasoning for the duration of a brief detour.

We ask you to think for a moment about the challenges for developers when designing a device for a double-digit budget - it’s frantically hard to stand out where 314 have already tried before you. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not suggesting that Lenovo put this segment on top of its head, but at two points we’re already seeing remarkable numbers: battery and memory. It’s not even out of the question that even small-money self-crazy people do well with the stuff, that’s going to be clear later.

Full specification

Product details

Model: Lenovo A5 (L18021)
SoC: CPU: MT6739 (1,5 GHz, quad-core, 28 nm, 64-bit) and GPU: PowerVR GE8100 (570 MHz)
Operating System: Android 8.1 Oreo (August Security Pack, ZUI 3.0)
Memory: 3 GB LPDDR3 RAM (667 MHz) and
16 / 32 GB ROM (Micro SD support for 256 GB, dedicated slot) 
Expansion: Nano SIM + Nano SIM
Battery: 4000 mAh (non-replaceable)
DisplaySize: 5,45 ″ (IPS), 76,7 cm² (73,9% display / front panel ratio)
Resolution: HD + (720 × 1440 pixels)
Pixel density: 295 ppi
Notification LED: yes
CameraRear camera, 13 MP (f / 2,2 aperture, autofocus, LED assist light, 1080p @ 30fps)
8 MP front camera (fixed focus, f / 2,2 aperture, LED flash)
Network4G FDD-LTE:
FDD B1, FDD B20, FDD B3, FDD B5, FDD B7, FDD B8
3G WCDMA:
WCDMA B1, WCDMA B2, WCDMA B5, WCDMA B8 
2G GSM:
850 MHz / 900 MHz / 1800 MHz / 1900 MHz
GPS and connectionsGPS / A-GPS
Wi-Fi 802.11 b / g / n, WiFi Direct, hotspot

Bluetooth 4.2, A2DP, LE 
FM radio

sensorslight sensor
Accelerometer
proximity sensor
Fingerprint

Dimensions and weight

146,2 × 70,9 × 9,8 mm and 160 grams

Package contents

1 × Lenovo A5, 1 × EU Power Charger, 1 × Micro USB Cable, 1 × English Owner's Manual, 1 × SIM Needle

It is clear from the above data that today, this device is playing football in the lower house, but it can also be seen that the hardware is likely to hit the required minimum.

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Packaging and exterior

The confident cleanliness of the cover gives the impression that a bloody cannon has come into our possession, even though it is out of the question. We are not scattered with too much information by the manufacturer, the basic data is not revealed until we dig ourselves into the package. Unfortunately, Lenovo was not generous with accessories: In addition to the A5, we find the charging head, microUSB cable, SIM needle, and English user manual - we don't get a silicone case, but unfortunately not even a screen protector. Fortunately, these deficiencies are easily replaced by penny items, yet we imagine engraving a small black dot.

1IMG 20181112 123344

A few years ago, we certainly wouldn’t have bet a large amount on a smartphone with a 5,45-inch display soon to hit the average-sized marker, but now that’s the fighting situation. The 18: 9 aspect ratio display has a resolution of 1440 × 720 pixels, fills 73,9 percent of the front panel (Gearbest mentions 80,3%), which implies that it is not explicitly “frameless”. In today's conditions, this is almost an eccentricity, the same mentality has gained ground in connection with the sensor island, so it went into the soup. The exterior color reminds us of the heroic age of smartphones, in this respect it can even be said to be a fresh spot of color in addition to the many thin types of coffee. A pleasant concomitant of the restrained physical extent is that it is not necessary to perform finger-stretching exercises to use the A5 with one hand. We find the notification LED in the upper right corner of the front page, we would have two comments on that. The first is that, by default, the device blocks all applications from running in the background, which makes it inevitably impossible for notifications to appear, so we will need to control this separately for application permissions. The other is that the LED does not have particularly strong light effects, it is relatively difficult to pinpoint its signals from afar.

lenovo a5 tech

The existence of the miracle beetle is essentially exhausted above, at other points things are already in military order: on the right we find the power button (the SIM tray is on the other side), above it the volume controls, on the top of the device the 3,5 mm and the jack connector resides and a microUSB input is located at the bottom. There are already some subtleties around the 8-megapixel front-facing camera, here’s the A5’s only speaker and front-facing LED flash - which can still come in handy for those obsessed with selfies.

lenovo a5

The back cover features a fingerprint reader, 13-megapixel camera and auxiliary light. The engineers have placed the latter duo in the top left corner, which is good because we’re probably not going to pinch it together when we do biometric identification. We did not find any objections in the quality of the assembly, the pressure point of the side buttons is excellent, it can only be felt at the back that we have no flagship in our hands at all. The excuse for a plastic “robe” should be said to be at least safe to grip, not of the slippery variety.

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Display

Despite the slightly cool calibrated colors, this compact shape is appealing, nowadays it becomes a rarity to come across one-handed use somewhere. There is no complaint about the sensitivity of the touch panel, as well as the viewing angle, but the brightness could be higher, because we really need to get closer to the end of the slider in sunny weather to get usable visibility. Nor does the fact that automatic control saves the figure help. We have to take care of the physical protection of the display, it is worth tossing a glass foil on it. The resolution of the display is at the maximum possible (SoC supports this much), 295 PPI proved to be sufficient, we think this is an optimal value for panels of this size.

Internal

The gadget is powered by the MediaTek MTK28 SoC with a bandwidth of 6739 nm. The system chip is a relatively new product (meaning it was announced a good year ago), bringing together four ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores and the PowerVR GE8100 IGP - among many other things, of course. The official clock speed of the 64-bit processor cores is 1,50 GHz (according to Device Info HW, this is what the A5 achieves), even the graphics chip is cracking at 570 MHz. For the latter, it is worth noting that it supports OpenGL 3.2, Vulkan 1.1, and OpenCL 1.2, and also maintains a good relationship with H.264 and H.265 / HEVC standards. The only real weak point of the chip seems to be the energy requirement, this is still being thoroughly examined.

Of course, it's not just Lenovo that builds on this chip, but on closer inspection, we can say that it can be considered a popular SoC in this segment: Alcatel 3x, Honor 7S, Cubot Nova, HTC Desire 12, Huawei Y5 2018, Leagoo M9 Pro, etc. There are some differences, too, because some manufacturers run the stuff at 1,30 GHz, and of course it's not a common phenomenon to have 3GB of memory attached to it.

MediaTek Mt6739

Based on our experience, the computational performance moved at the expected level, but there were some surprises here and there - more on that later. Compared to its big rival Xiaomi Redmi 6A, the lag is small, its advantage comes from the minimal clock surplus. Overall, the language of the scales may still tend to tilt towards the Lenovo A5, because here the system memory is 3,0 GB, while the foxed millet similar solution works with little 2,0 GB. The size of RAM can be said to be unusual with some kind of goodwill, in this price category, 2,0 GB is the standard - it seems to have 2018 at the end of this new minimum. The 16 GB ROM is going to end up in the clouds, with just over 8,0 GB being the usable storage space. In the absence of MicroSD expansion, the title of the year would certainly be the winner of the year's title, but this is not happening because we can use up to 5 GB cards without any problems. Make sure that if you insert an SD card as an internal storage, you pay as much attention to speed as the size. 

PowerVR 8XEP LaunchEmbargo Jan17 PDF 18 575pxPowerVR 8XEP LaunchEmbargo Jan17 PDF 20 575px

The MTK6739 brain karisted at 46 points during AnTuTu, and the Geébench stopped at a fat 251 points (1 on a nucleus). We also ran a couple of web gauges, SunSpider 859 produced a non-explicit drop-down of 657 ms, while the Lenovo A1.0.2: 2 dot had already “soared” under the AnTuTu HTML037 gauge - e.g. better than the result of the Huawei P5, which works with three years of state-of-the-art hardware. With MotionMark 5, we closed the line of synthetic tests, which, by the way, also confirmed to us that not a high-end iron knocks under the back cover. 

Let’s talk a little bit about our own experiences, these are perhaps even more authoritative than the various measurement programs. The Lenovo A5 can be said to be agile as long as you can use the resources of the CPU for a particular application. In practice, this means that e.g. you can browse it perfectly until a resource-intensive app pops up in the background - this can happen in an update launched by Google Play. Running a complex measurement program in Chrome can also cause a spectacular slowdown; the quad-core MTK6739 can only meet these expectations if it is no longer loaded from another direction during the given operation. So multitasking is forgetful from this approach, but the correct internal memory (of which 1-000 MB is empty) will be good for apps to stay in RAM for a relatively long time. Of course, reloads happen that way, we wouldn't really like to think about what life would be like here with 1 GB.

Playful shoppers obviously don’t find their calculation on this smartphone, but it can’t be called completely hopeless either. There will probably be no problems with simpler 2D games, the three-dimensional recreation will be more strenuous, especially if you want to try one or two more titles - Dead Trigger 2 is not an obstacle, PUBG is also a stutter, although there is no big thanks. We can provide fantastic news to the fans of the tanks, the well-tailored World of Tanks Blitz produces a particularly prime gaming experience on the device, with this you can beat the time well! It’s worth noting that the system chip has no tendency to heat up at all, and the processor couldn’t overheat the back cover even after running to the top for long minutes.

Screenshot 2018 11 17 12 32ShareScreenshot 2018 11 17 12 22

Szoftver

At this point, Lenovo did not lag behind the competition either, the operating system is played by the absolutely up-to-date Android 8.1 (Oreo), which has been turbocharged with a user interface called ZUI 3.0. We have already discussed that the robotic system is not dominated by unlimited resources, however, we have rarely encountered more serious bumps, the software handles horsepower efficiently enough. Let’s say we don’t explicitly understand why the manufacturer’s scarce internal storage has been so scattered by the manufacturer, luckily a significant portion of these can be deleted so we can regain some capacity. By the way, exactly 40 apps were pressed onto the ROM at the factory, these are as follows:

  • Utility: Freezer, Clock, Notes, Calculator, SIM card toolkit, File manager, Settings, Finally Clean, Truecaller;
  • Multimedia: FM Radio, Sound Record, Video Player, Music Player;
  • Games: Asphalt Nitro, Bubble Bash 3, Little Big City 2, Puzzle Pets, Sonic Runners, Spiderman
  • Other: UC Browser, AppDaily, Syncit, Themes, Beauty Fit, Intelligent aggregating page (more on this later)
  • Google Package: Chrome, Maps, Youtube, Drive, Photos, Gmail, Duo, Play Music and Movies
123
456
789

The biscuit miracle is approx. half the memory cuppan on it, after preloading the GUI's responsiveness can be said to be good, with cold starts you can obviously feel that not a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 is beating inside the stuff. The ZUI is, by the way, far more than a raw Android. This is a particularly good thing in 99 percent of cases (but a dirty bottom-up swipe of apps is missing), here's a brief list of the more compelling capabilities of the system:

  • Scheduled (from sunset to sunrise or at any time) night light;
  • Flashlight, split screen mode, weather forecast widget;
  • You can change the animation between the home screens as you like;
  • Intelligent aggregating page application (multifunctional search engine - news, apps);
  • You can lock apps in a task changer (these will not be released by Android), or by tapping to open their information page.

We’re really good at news anyway: flipping left will show the Google News Search, two more pages to the right, the aforementioned Intelligent aggregating page will reveal world events. It is important to note that the Lenovo A5 Play Protect is certified, so:

  • Google-licensed applications owned by Google;
  • successfully passed the Android Compatibility Test.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in the system is that a very significant portion of the menu items, at least a third of them at first glance, are in English, so the localization is, to put it mildly, half-finished - hopefully that will change with the next update. The security package is for August, and no newer version of this or the user interface has been received yet. The stability of the operating system is exemplary anyway, despite the modest resources, nothing remained unresponsive during testing, with enough patience all tasks recovered from their undead state.

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Camera

The other point where cost reduction never goes painless, and it is no different now. Let’s start with the fact that the software flashed a fairly pleasant repertoire: timelaps, panoramic photography, watermarking, face beautification, advanced and “AI” mode, HDR. There’s also geotagging (providing photos with GPS coordinates), and it’s also a joyous phenomenon that in addition to the back, the front camera also got a flash. Anyway, before using for the first time, it is definitely worth browsing through the options thoroughly, because e.g. videos are not in the best quality by default, so it's a good idea to switch this.

Screenshot 2018 11 17 20 19Screenshot 2018 11 17 20 21
Screenshot 2018 11 17 20 20Screenshot 2018 11 17 20 19

The A5 is capable of evaluable production under optimal light conditions, but can produce paranormal phenomena in the dark. The dynamic range can be said to be satisfactory with some benevolence, the line sharpness is no longer necessarily. Usually we can discover some over-sharpening, all of which is crowned by lens distortion at the edges. The pace of focusing can be said to be average, this is also approximately the characteristic of the finished materials. Therefore, for the sake of money, we cannot expect overwhelming image quality, we think the paper form came in this area. We also made a short video (in Full HD at 30 fps) so you can better judge the capabilities of the camera. Yes, you will also see from this that the material is made by hand and that the optical image stabilizer is missing. 

IMG 20181115 124337IMG 20181115 124954IMG 20181115 125149IMG 20181117 132817
IMG 20181115 125338 IMG 20181115 125502IMG 20181115 125821IMG 20181117 131605
IMG 20181115 165627IMG 20181115 165439IMG 20181115 130356IMG 20181115 170020

The video looks like this:

Connections, other

With the Lenovo A5 we can move to the entire domestic 4G / LTE frequency band (1800 MHz (B3), 2600 MHz (B7) and 800 MHz (B20)), WiFi of course has spoken with their 802.11 b / g / n gadgets (in the 2,4 GHz range) and can also act as a hotspot. Standard features include Bluetooth 4.2, AGPS and GPS, but no NFC - no big surprise. As you may have read before, the jack socket was not left behind on the phone either, and then we have to mention the existence of the FM radio, which brings us to the end of the imaginary list. It is also worth noting that the two SIM modes are also available due to the three slots when expanding the available storage space with an SD card.

We were not completely satisfied with the positioning system (GPS). The satellite search was carried out at a remarkable speed, in this field down with the hat in front of the A5, but the accuracy left much to be desired; Google Maps is sometimes inside the walls of buildings positioned us, and in one case a street, was wrong, so it is certainly not recommended to use a precision strike weapon - not a Paladin is lost in it. The WiFi module played significantly better, which excelled both in the quality of the connection (stability, search, etc.) and in the data transfer rate.

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The fingerprint reader is well tested. Fingerprint recording was a rather lengthy procedure, but it was undoubtedly worth it because A5 had more than 90% dissolution efficiency - in exchange for the test not just at light speed. It's hard to imagine that this way of unlocking would not be for someone else, but if that was the case, then there is still the possibility of Face Unlock.

Speaker also fills the main speaker as well, for Honor 7S. The sound quality was okay, but the volume is noticeably limited - it does not distort, in return it does not produce an earshot. Of course, this performance is perfectly enough for calls, but it's sleek for listening to music.

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Battery and operating time

Iron is not made with a state-of-the-art manufacturing technology (28 nm), but the relatively low number of pixels and the combo battery still have a beneficial effect: with average use, it can be calculated with a 2-3 day availability. We provide various auxiliary services (one-button optimization, Freezer, battery saving mode) to provide the operating time, together with 10% charge for 12-1 minutes of browsing with automatic brightness. YouTube draws 60-13% of cocoa in 15 minutes, therefore we can count on a complete afternoon to be sure to pull out the stuff.

The Lenovo A5 dropped 2% of its power level in ample half-day standby, so the chip is capable of delivering in power-saving mode. The factory-supplied charger feeds 5 volts and 2 amps, in the ideal range (30% to 80%) in just 55-60 minutes, so in the worst case, you're sure to pull the phone to a usable level in two hours . We didn't see any significant warming during charging, so the back cover insulates quite well.

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Summary

Lenovo A5 is a great example of why a that's the money expression. Of course, the phone is far from perfect, but we would put up a moderately large amount of money that you simply won’t find a better deal on the market with that much money! Let’s start with the fact that 3GB of system memory at this price level is a really rare phenomenon, as is a fingerprint reader, which is exceptionally usable anyway. Then there's the flash-enabled front-facing camera, its counterparts capable of acceptable quality in an optimal environment, and it's not worth forgetting the Wifi with great range. The 5,45-inch display looks like a kind of golden mean, it is easy to handle due to its size, while it is also good to read due to its 18: 9 aspect ratio. Okay, the GPS could be more accurate and the backlighting a little more powerful - the automaton is a little under-parameterizing - but these are things we can live with. 

The MTK6739 SoC undoubtedly limits the usability of the A5, so it’s worth being aware of, but this smartphone will be great if you’re in the picture in terms of its capabilities. This child of Lenovo was born mainly to face simple, everyday challenges - browsing, social media management, correspondence, and more. It’s good for you to get a taste of this world, as the operating system is up to date, the resources available in the vast majority of cases are enough to start “everything”, try it - now the other question is what quality. From this point of view, the A5 can thus be seen as a first step, a pleasant entrance card, and then, as the years go by, a descendant blessed with a more steep elevation may come.

After testing, we've come to the conclusion that the gadget confidently jumps to expectations for minimal usability, so we can recommend it to you with a calm heart if you look at this price level. That’s why it’s a really good offer, obviously if you’re going to spend even more money on your purchase, you’re sure to find better solutions, but the Lenovo A5 has nevertheless become a fair, likeable, lovable device!

Lenovo A5 - Not Even a Hundred! (now with coupon discount) 1

Lenovo A5 is currently available on Gearbone (click on the picture), its price is $ 89,99. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask! 

Update!

GBMPLOI8 with coupon code, the Lenovo A5 is $ 85,99 for a limited time, so it's an unbeatable offer!

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