Lenovo K6 Power Review

Lenovo has been pretty aggressive with their smartphones in India. Recently they launched the flagship device, the Z2 Plus at great pricing. Lenovo is also no.2 in terms of market share in India and they were the first to launch 4G LTE enabled phones in India last year. Recently they announced their budget device, the K6 Power, which comes with 5 inch Full HD display and is powered by Snapdragon 430 SoC with 3GB RAM and 32GB storage.

So how does the Lenovo K6 Power perform and will it be able to match up with the performance offered by Redmi 3S prime? Let’s find out in this detailed review.

Design and build:

When you first see the Lenovo K6 power you can see the striking similarity with the Redmi 3S prime with curved rear panel and metal unibody design. The rear panel has the 13MP camera unit placed at the center along with LED flash. The fingerprint scanner sits below the camera and there is also Lenovo branding and dual speakers below it.

The right side houses the power and volume keys while the SIM tray is on the left side. The 3.5mm audio jack and micro USB charging slot are at the top. The front panel of the K6 Power has the 5-inch HD display, with capacitive navigation buttons below, but unfortunately they are not backlit.

Overall, the K6 Power feels premium and easy to use, thanks to the smaller form factor. The build quality of the device is also very good.

Display:

Lenovo has included a 5.0 inch Full HD display with a resolution of 1920 X 1080p. The display quality on the K6 Power looks quite good with good colors and sharpness levels. The viewing angles are also good. The phone also comes with options to change the display color temperature, so you can play with it to get the best display color temperature. The touch response was initially a bit sticky, but over a period of usage it became quite good. There is no protection offered on the display. So it is always advisable to use a screen guard with the device.

Software:

Lenovo K6 Power ships with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with Vibe UI. While Lenovo improved the Vibe UI and now comes with UI similar to stock Android although you can also switch the UI. The Vibe UI comes with app drawer and also do a bit of customizations in the UI. The notification panel is again a custom one and you also have the option to customize the quick toggles.

The Vibe UI on K6 Power also comes with additional features like gestures. The settings panel also has Android Marshmallow look and feel. There is support for Dolby and VR headset. The phone also comes with a lot of bloatware similar to any other Lenovo phone. There are many core apps included like calculator, recorder, compass, FM radio and more. A hand full of third party apps and games are included which we feel should be avoided.

The phone also comes with theme center, where you can do a bit of customization with themes, lock screens and also multitasking style. Overall, the Vibe UI feels good to use especially for people who love near stock like experience. But it is no where close to MIUI in terms of the features offered.

Performance:

Lenovo K6 Power is powered by the Snapdragon 430 Octa core processor with Adreno 505 GPU coupled with 3GB RAM. It supports 4G LTE along with dual SIM cards. There is 32GB onboard storage out of which around 24GB is available to the user. It comes with hybrid SIM card and supports micro SD card up to 128GB.

Talking about the performance of the device, the phone performed quite well in day to day tasks like browsing, calls, social networking, camera usage etc., as it has plenty of RAM. The gaming performance of the device was quite decent. Although there was no major lag, there were quite a lot of frame skips in the gaming test. We tested high graphic rich games like Asphalt 8 Airborne and the overall performance was quite decent. The phone also did get warm while playing games and reached around 43-44 degrees after half an hour of gaming.

The call quality on the phone was quite good. If you are a person who loves music, Lenovo K6 Power is the device for you as the phone has DOLBY Atmos supports, the speaker performance was very good and this is one of the those devices for people who consume a lot of multimedia content. The phone packs Wi-Fi, Bluetooth while NFC is missing on this device. The fingerprint sensor is located on the rear panel and it works very well. You can add multiple fingerprints to unlock the device. There is also VR support similar to other Lenovo devices.

Camera:

Lenovo K6 Power packs a 13MP rear camera with LED flash and PDAF (Phase detection auto focus) and a front facing 8MP camera for selfies. The interface is the Snapit camera app from Lenovo and comes with the Smart mode we first saw on Lenovo Vibe Shot. The Smart mode can automatically detect the mode based on light conditions and subject being shot. The camera samples taken with the rear 13MP camera came out good in daylight with good details and sharpness levels. If you enable Smart mode, some outdoor photos have slightly saturated colors, but overall quality looks good. Even for close up shots, the detailing is good. But when it comes to low light experience, the camera suffers with noise. Even with artificial lights, the photos came out poor with high amount of noise.

The K6 Power can record videos at full-HD resolution and the quality was again good in daylight. The front camera can take decent selfies in well-lit situations and good for social shares. Here are some of the samples taken with the device.

Battery Life:

Lenovo K6 Power as the name indicates comes with a massive 4000mAh battery packed in the small form factor. The battery performance of the device is very good and with moderate usage you can easily get 1.5 days of battery life. Even with heavy usage, you can easily get over a day of battery life. Another interesting aspect of the phone is that even with a full HD display it was able to get almost similar battery performance like the Redmi 3S prime with an HD display. Overall, if you are looking for a device with great battery life, K6 Power won’t disappoint you.

Verdict:

Lenovo K6 Power is priced Rs 9999 and is one of those phones in budget segment which ticks all the right boxes. It has good design, build, decent display and performance along with great battery life and speaker performance. Probably the only area where we thought K6 Power could have been better is the low light performance of the camera. If you are looking for an all round device with which is compact and performs very well, then K6 Power is definitely a good buy.