Lenovo Vibe Shot Review

Lenovo Vibe Shot Review

This mid-premium segment came to be mainly because people want a device that looks and feels premium, but the new features each years flagships bring have become even more far-fetched. Will you ever use those features? Perhaps, perhaps not.

The camera is not the only area that impresses as the Vibe Shot is above average in many other criteria. It comes with a 5-inch Full HD display, octacore Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of memory storage, Android OS 5.1 (Lollipop) with a slightly modified Vibe UI, and a lush battery with the capacity of 3000mAh. This promising list of specifications holds up in everyday use, which is why the shortcomings of this compact camera and smartphone hybrid are hard to spot.  

On the top plate of the phone (when held in lan dscape orientation) you’ll find a switch and shutter button. The switch puts the camera in either auto or pro mode. Auto mode worked well enough, with Face tracking and smile detection following people’s faces stubbornly. But if you want a bit more control over your image, the pro mode gives you control over shutter speed, exposure compensation, ISO, White balance presets and drive mode.

The Lenovo Vibe Shot uses a 5-inch full HD (1080p) IPS display that gives decent viewing angles, well balanced color, crisp text and respectable outdoor legibility. Be it playing games or streaming videos, it’s a soothing experience. It’s interesting to see that Lenovo has gone ahead with a 5-inch display panel over the popular 5.5-inch and even larger screen sizes. A relatively small d isplay helps keep it compact and maintain the aesthetics as it strives to look like a compact point-and-shoot camera.

But its the inclusion of a mode selector switch thats truly interesting. Its got two options — "Smart" and "Pro." The former keeps you in full auto mode, so you dont have to think too much about what youre shooting. In fact, the camera is smart enough to recognize that faces arent food and can adjust itself once it recognizes that youre shooting people versus produce. "Pro" mode gives you full manual control.

The left side of the Lenovo Vibe Shot holds a slot for two microSIM cards (this is a dual SIM phone) and a microSD card slot. All the physical keys are located on the right side. Apart from the usual power key and the volume rocker, there is also the designated two-step camera shutter button and a tiny rocker that switches between automatic and manual camera modes. It can also be used to wake up the device from stand-by, which is a practical feature for those users who find the Power key to be too low for their liking.

In the box, you get a charger, headset, data cable, and a screen guard. Oddly, all the accessories that we received were white, when the phone itself is black. The quality of the accessories is good and they should last.

Today, well be reviewing its camera-centric Lenovo Vibe Shot. We first saw this phone at its announcement at MWC 2015, and it then launched in India in September. The Vibe Shot is an upper-mid-range offering that aims to capture the hearts of photography lovers with its compact-camera-like design and features. Lets see if its worthy of its Rs. 25,000 price tag.

The rest of the Vibe Shot perhaps isnt quite as exciting. The bodys a bit blocky, though it is easy enough to hold. Its got a 5-inch, 1080p display, is running Android 5.0 Lollipop with Lenovos custom UI, and the whole thing is powered by a 64-bit Snapdragon 615 processor.

Given its software bugs and limited video capabilities, the Vibe Shot feels a bit expensive at its current price of Rs. 25,000. If Lenovo can fix these things with future software updates and drop the price a little, then it will have a strong chance of disrupting the mid-range segment.

We still fondly remember the Vibe X2 design and while the Vibe Shot is different, we think well remember it for a while too. It features a metal strip on the back to hold the camera and all its friends, which makes it look more like a compact camera than a smartphone.

The HDR mode is my main issue with the phone’s camera software. This setting has a tendency to hang the camera app, only to be revived with a restart. I would have lived with that if the results were good, but the artistic HDR only throws up really saturated images that don’t justify the trouble you have to go through to get them in the first place. The other issue is with the background blur option, where I struggled to find the perfect distance from the subject.

Coming to the User Interface part, Lenovo has pre-loaded its own Vibe UI over Android 5.1. The interface isn’t very extraordinary, but it’s surprisingly quite smooth to navigate, and looks good as well with vivid colors. The UI brings a slew of themes, and useful features such as tap to wake up display, shortcuts to apps and a few additional tweaks, providing more flexibility to personalize the look and feel. Despite being heavily customized, the Vibe UI gets the job done.

VerdictThe Lenovo Vibe Shot is a beautifully crafted smartphone for shutterbugs. The build and finish are great, and you get a vivid display, good battery life and a full-featured camera system. The software, while fluid for the m ost part, does have a number of glitches which Lenovo needs to fix soon. It would also have been nice if we had some modes for video recording other than the standard one. Finally, the phone is a fingerprint nightmare so keeping it clean is not the easiest thing to do.

Sound quality is not the forte of the Vibe shot. The audio quality on the phone is above average, while the earphones didn’t deliver much. The Vibe Shot has single speaker which is also not very outstanding. Call quality, however, is fine enough. Like most smartphones these days, the Vibe Shot comes with dual-SIM card support along with 4G connectivity.