First off, full disclosure I am not affiliated with Lenovo/Zuk or Amazon or the Seller yaantra, your experience might be completely different from mine, however I think the possibility of it being bad is very low, and if you do what I've done, you'll likely end up with a very similar experience.
I've been using the Z2 Plus for the last 3 weeks, got it as a refurb unit on Amazon for 7999rs. Yep, a steal for that price, especially since new phones like the redmis of the world come with much lower specs at that price range. Quick spec sheet rundown;
4GB RAM, 64GB storage, Snapdragon 820, 3500mah battery, 13mp camera.
For all that hardware, the price is beyond fantastic. Another huge attraction for me is compactness. This is a 5" device, 68.6mm wide, perfect for one handed use unlike every single 5.5" device out there, and the overall package is incredible. Build is a classic glass sandwich design which helps give it a premium feel, the sides are very reminiscent of iPhone SE and older devices which had that solid grippable candybar feel, love it.
Display is fantastic at 1080p, the guys at notebook check did a cool indepth analysis of the LCD and found it to be very good, I'd agree. The specs also mean it's better than any 10,000rs mid ranger today (820 slightly edges over the 636 and 660 in CPU and a huge upgrade in GPU) and the price to performance was insane at 7999, especially considering this device launched at 19,990.
The Refrub unit came in a day from Delhi seller yaantra mobiles, good amazon packaging but the actual phone box was messeddddd up, really dirty and smashed, looked like it sat in dust for a while. Opened it up worried that I got a bad device, thankfully it was absolutely unscratched, as good as new, and came with the charger and Type-C cable. Lenovo originally included a thin TPU case with the device which was missing, but that's fine.
Now onto the device itself, the stock software IMO was horrendous. Heating up like a bee-sting, laggy, weird custom interface over stock android that felt off. Immediately proceeded to ZUK's unlocking page, put in the handset serial number (added a zero because it was only 7 digits weird), got the unlocked boot img, flashed, twrp'd, the whole thing all under 30 minutes. Installed 8.1.0 based custom rom (I chose the AEX rom but there's plenty of great ones out there), and got all my apps back on.
Now it felt great, but the device was still heating up a little bit, so I decided to install Kernel Aduitor and enable Thermal throttling. Poof, heating gone completely, the 14nm cpu is now super efficient, and stock android breezes through daily use with smoothness, and performance is still top notch. Ran some benchmarks, Antutu 7 did 152k with throttling ON, and 172k with throttling off (but it did get very very hot). I think that slight performance hit is ok if the device can stay cool. PUBG Mobile played nicely over 30fps on medium settings with throttling on, but obviously that sucks up battery a lot, so one 30 min round took away 25% battery. Expected for a beastly processor like this I believe.
Last thing was the camera, which was mediocre on the stock rom. Thankfully the Google HDR cam app is ported over to SD820 devices with custom roms, so installed the apk (I used Arnova's Pixel2Mod_v6) and wow... The cam is now mind blowing. It has portrait mode, is capable of 60fps video at 1080p, or 30fps video at 4k, or even 120fps SloMo at 1080p. The images are solid when the HDR+ Enhanced profile kicks in, of course its no Galaxy S9, but in reality for the price I'd say they're Fantastic and better than most other cameras. No other 8k phone can do what this thing is doing!
Granted it has only been a few weeks, but so far my experience has been phenomenal. If you use custom roms on devices, and are looking for a new device, I would recommend this device so much, especially if you can get it for under 10k refurb, yaantra mobile had some more discounts on their site bringing the price down to 6400 but I didn't risk it, got it via Amazon just in case. Careful though as there are two models, 3GB/32GB and 4GB/64GB, make sure you get the latter for lots of storage and RAM.
Will update my post over the next few weeks with pics and any other experiences, so far loving it!
I've been using the Z2 Plus for the last 3 weeks, got it as a refurb unit on Amazon for 7999rs. Yep, a steal for that price, especially since new phones like the redmis of the world come with much lower specs at that price range. Quick spec sheet rundown;
4GB RAM, 64GB storage, Snapdragon 820, 3500mah battery, 13mp camera.
For all that hardware, the price is beyond fantastic. Another huge attraction for me is compactness. This is a 5" device, 68.6mm wide, perfect for one handed use unlike every single 5.5" device out there, and the overall package is incredible. Build is a classic glass sandwich design which helps give it a premium feel, the sides are very reminiscent of iPhone SE and older devices which had that solid grippable candybar feel, love it.
Display is fantastic at 1080p, the guys at notebook check did a cool indepth analysis of the LCD and found it to be very good, I'd agree. The specs also mean it's better than any 10,000rs mid ranger today (820 slightly edges over the 636 and 660 in CPU and a huge upgrade in GPU) and the price to performance was insane at 7999, especially considering this device launched at 19,990.
The Refrub unit came in a day from Delhi seller yaantra mobiles, good amazon packaging but the actual phone box was messeddddd up, really dirty and smashed, looked like it sat in dust for a while. Opened it up worried that I got a bad device, thankfully it was absolutely unscratched, as good as new, and came with the charger and Type-C cable. Lenovo originally included a thin TPU case with the device which was missing, but that's fine.
Now onto the device itself, the stock software IMO was horrendous. Heating up like a bee-sting, laggy, weird custom interface over stock android that felt off. Immediately proceeded to ZUK's unlocking page, put in the handset serial number (added a zero because it was only 7 digits weird), got the unlocked boot img, flashed, twrp'd, the whole thing all under 30 minutes. Installed 8.1.0 based custom rom (I chose the AEX rom but there's plenty of great ones out there), and got all my apps back on.
Now it felt great, but the device was still heating up a little bit, so I decided to install Kernel Aduitor and enable Thermal throttling. Poof, heating gone completely, the 14nm cpu is now super efficient, and stock android breezes through daily use with smoothness, and performance is still top notch. Ran some benchmarks, Antutu 7 did 152k with throttling ON, and 172k with throttling off (but it did get very very hot). I think that slight performance hit is ok if the device can stay cool. PUBG Mobile played nicely over 30fps on medium settings with throttling on, but obviously that sucks up battery a lot, so one 30 min round took away 25% battery. Expected for a beastly processor like this I believe.
Last thing was the camera, which was mediocre on the stock rom. Thankfully the Google HDR cam app is ported over to SD820 devices with custom roms, so installed the apk (I used Arnova's Pixel2Mod_v6) and wow... The cam is now mind blowing. It has portrait mode, is capable of 60fps video at 1080p, or 30fps video at 4k, or even 120fps SloMo at 1080p. The images are solid when the HDR+ Enhanced profile kicks in, of course its no Galaxy S9, but in reality for the price I'd say they're Fantastic and better than most other cameras. No other 8k phone can do what this thing is doing!
Granted it has only been a few weeks, but so far my experience has been phenomenal. If you use custom roms on devices, and are looking for a new device, I would recommend this device so much, especially if you can get it for under 10k refurb, yaantra mobile had some more discounts on their site bringing the price down to 6400 but I didn't risk it, got it via Amazon just in case. Careful though as there are two models, 3GB/32GB and 4GB/64GB, make sure you get the latter for lots of storage and RAM.
Will update my post over the next few weeks with pics and any other experiences, so far loving it!
