A giant mid ranger for big screen lovers.
I've already posted something about the Lenovo phab 2 pro with Google tango. It's here in case you missed it. This is the review of somewhat mid-ranger of the phab 2 series, the Lenovo phab 2 plus.
Design: The phab 2 plus is made of an aluminium alloy with clear cut chamfered edges and smooth corners. But just like it's big brother phab 2 pro, it's pretty heavy to hold. It weighs 220 gm and is 9.6 mm thick. Not something that style fanatics would love to have. But I have no complaints, as this one feels sturdy and substantial in the hand, with nice clicky volume and power buttons on the right, a headphone jack up top and a microUSB port with a speaker grills on both sides. It's just a mono speaker on the right and left one is a microphone. There are 2 colors: grey and champagne.
Display: The phone has a gorgeous 6.4 1080p IPS LCD panel with 344 ppi. It's scratch resistant 2.5D curved glass screen can produce excellent colors and brilliant viewing angles. The display was bright enough outdoors and the light glare was kept to a minimum, maybe because of some kind of oleophobic coating. The saturation is very well balanced to deliver a natural look that's both crisp and pleasing to view. Overall it's a very good display to have in your device but my only gripe with it is that it has thick black borders around the display. I know it's nothing new, and it's been on pretty much every new chinese phone out there, but it's a bit thicker than what I usually see. So if you're like me and bothered by the frame around the display, better get the grey version.
Performance: The phab 2 plus is powered by a new Mediatek MT8783 quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz and a Mali MP T720-MP3 GPU along with 3GB DDR3 RAM. The 64bit silicon piece from Mediatek doesn't seem all that powerful in paper but it does deliver good performance. During gaming there was some stuttering here and there on asphalt 8 Max graphics, but it doesn't show any signs of overheating. That's a good thing since the GPU happens to be a bit dated and you couldn't ask for more than what you're getting here.
The phone has 32 GB storage built in and you can further expand it up to 256 GB via an SD card.
The phone has a fingerprint sensor on the rear and as usual these days, it's really fast and accurate. You can register upto 5 different fingerprints and it unlocks your phone within 0.5s. Modern day smartphone sensors are so fast, doesn't matter which budget segment you're on!
The phone runs on a stock like UI based off of Android 6.0 marshmallow. The icon pack seems a bit like old Android ICS (icecream sandwich 4.0) but performs smoothly with no visible lag or stutters. Very happy with the experience but I'd install a custom launcher anyway😅!
Camera: The phone has a 13 mp dual camera setup on the rear with f/2.0 aperture and dual LED flash and laser autofocus system. The front camera is an 8 mp sensor with f/2.2 aperture. Cameras are quite good and take some crisp photos. The dual sensor help capture more detail under lower lighting situations but shutter speed as usual, slows down of you keep both sensors on. The front camera also takes pretty good looking selfies. I really liked the exposure of the background which was pretty accurate. Similar to the excellent exposure of selfie camera on the LG G5. Very impressed with the camera's performance and you'll be delighted to click away too.
Battery: Big phone, big battery. The phone houses a 4050mAh battery unit. There is no mentioned quick charging functionality but the supplied charger can go from 0 to 95\\% around 2 hrs, which isn't too bad considering the capacity. The standby time is also really good and the battery doesn't drop a lot of juice in idle state. You'll get about 5½ hrs if usage time with it.
Price: Ok, here we go. The deciding factor for many people including myself😜. The phone is priced at 19,000 INR. You're getting a great looking phone with a nice and bright display, big battery and good set of cameras. Not bad for the budget of under 20K, wouldn't you say?!
