User Review The ultimate battery smartphone? Lenovo P770 unboxed and benchmarked

**Originally posted in my blog, I have removed a few images here to shorten load times**


A couple of years ago India’s leading car manufacturer ran an advertising campaign completely built on social insights and deep rooted in the ‘value’ ethos. ‘Kitna deti hai’ was the question asked for all possible vehicles. Be it a space shuttle to Mars or a $100 million yacht, it was the mileage that was of prime importance.
While not quite the same, I’m holding the Lenovo P770 phone box in my hand and I can’t help thinking about that. Why? Because of the amazing battery that comes in the box.

Why the Lenovo P770?
Retailing for about 14k rupees (about $250), this dual-sim phone features a mediatek dualcore 1.2GHz processor, 1GB ram, 4.5” IPS display with a resolution of 960x540(~245ppi), a 5MP primary camera, a VGA one in the front and comes with Android JellyBean 4.1. From most of the specs and price, it appears to be a decent mid range phone except for one massive difference. The battery is a whopping 3500mAh. Rated for 30 hours of talktime, it is perhaps the largest battery available on smartphones. (The galaxy note 2 for comparison has 3100mAh, the galaxy grand? 2100mAh and the micromax canvas HD comes with 2000mAh.)
If you constantly find yourself running out of charge before the end of the day, this phone is perhaps for you. Maybe it’s time to start asking the smartphone manufacturers the Maruti question… ‘Kitni battery life hai’?
Let’s see what’s in the box.

Lenovo P770 Unboxed:

The phone comes in an attractive black & orange box. Like all new smartphones, the box dimensions are just enough to fit the phone and the accessories under it.

P770 in the box
The box opens to reveal the phone, under the phone is a box of usual accessories: Battery, charger + USB to microUSB cable, a pair of headphones and one nice little surprise.. a USB OTG cable! (more on that later).

P770+Box_2.jpg




Inside the box (clockwise): Charger, USB cable, manual, headphones, battery & USB OTG cable

P770+box_3.jpg
The battery is the main hero here and it is massive! The phone weighs 161 grams and the battery accounts for 59 grams out of that!
The P770 Li-Ion battery is massive at 3500mAh

Initial impressions of the phone:
The build quality is nice and it looks like one would not need a case/cover for this. The screen does not have a gorilla glass but Lenovo claims it is scratch resistant. I think I’d get a screen protector anyway. The phone is available in only one color at the moment i.e. dark blue. It’s largely plastic but the back paint gives a nice brushed metal effect.
P770 straight out of the box. The screen protector is still on.

The P770 back has a brushed metal finish

On switching it on, you get a skinned version of Jelly Bean 4.1.1. Not my personal favorite but you can easily download a launcher from Google Play and fix that.
The homescreen on your first boot
There are few apps that come preinstalled: kingsoft office, accuweather, camcard, camscanner, chrome, facebook, handlight (torch), skype, sugarsync and UC browser. Lenovo has been good and does allow you to uninstall most of these. Only handlight didn’t show an uninstall option but then it’s only 8kb.

Benchmarks:
Antutu & quadrant scores on the P770 don’t disappoint nor do they surprise. They are exactly what can be expected out of a dual core device.Benchmarks:
Lenovo P770 Antutu score
In Antutu, the phone scored 7529 and in quadrant a respectable 3125.

But this phone isn’t a speed demon; it’s key selling point is its battery. Considering it’s a pretty large battery, I will run a few tests which will be covered in a few days. Other things I plan to write about are the camera quality & what that USB OTG cable can do. If you have any specific questions, do let me know...



*Edit #1: Have added some battery tests results in the thread below :Battery Tests

*Edit #2: Added the camera test results in the thread below: P770 Camera tests
 
nice review mate..
some details on gaming & multimedia would be appreciated... btw is it capable of doing/playing 720p ...??
 
nice review mate..
some details on gaming & multimedia would be appreciated... btw is it capable of doing/playing 720p ...??

Thanks mate... Running some of tests at the moment. Just that the battery is taking forever to drain :singing:... Will post the results soon. (At the moment, it's been playing mp3s in a loop for 14 hours straight and the battery is still in the 80s range)

nice review..

3G from both SIM1 & SIM2 or only from SIM1..?

Only SIM 1 supports 2G/3G.. SIM 2 is 2G only.
 
Is this phone available in the retail market or its a review edition, if not how much you paid to buy and from where?

Next thing is how good is the scrolling performance in homescreen and app drawer ? also in different scollviews and listviews ? Does the phone heat up much ?
 
Is this phone available in the retail market or its a review edition, if not how much you paid to buy and from where?

Next thing is how good is the scrolling performance in homescreen and app drawer ? also in different scollviews and listviews ? Does the phone heat up much ?

I got it on ebay. :). This one is perhaps the cheapest deal at the moment (+ if you have some coupons): http://www.ebay.in/itm/Lenovo-iDeap...nes&hash=item2c6d13ae20&_uhb=1#ht_3716wt_1139

Scrolling performance is lag-free. I guess the Lenovo skin on top is just a simple launcher (not ense/twlauncher level). I don't see any of the micro-lags that would irritate the cr@p:banghead: out of me on my SGS 1.
 
Very nice. I'm seriously considering this now. Good to hear that you don't see any micro-lags. 1GB RAM is a plus; most of the other companies only give 512MB in this price range. Thanks for the review!
 
I got it on ebay. :). This one is perhaps the cheapest deal at the moment (+ if you have some coupons): http://www.ebay.in/itm/Lenovo-iDeap...nes&hash=item2c6d13ae20&_uhb=1#ht_3716wt_1139

Scrolling performance is lag-free. I guess the Lenovo skin on top is just a simple launcher (not ense/twlauncher level). I don't see any of the micro-lags that would irritate the cr@p:banghead: out of me on my SGS 1.
Thanks mate, so according to the ebay post it has manufacture warranty in India, Can you also put some light on Storage capacities of the phone?
 
Nice review done mate. Although, i do not think it does well in the battery department. I'll be posting an alternate review of this phone on my blog & here on TE, before the day ends! :)
 
Nice review done mate. Although, i do not think it does well in the battery department. I'll be posting an alternate review of this phone on my blog & here on TE, before the day ends! :)

Hmmm... I'm getting decent test results. But then they are under ideal conditions... Look forward to your views:writing: .[DOUBLEPOST=1363579975][/DOUBLEPOST]
will the usb otg cable support a usb dac?

I doubt it would... (However I don't have a dac to check..)
 
In my previous post, we saw what's inside the P770 retail box & I also covered some quick benchmarks to check the overall performance. If you missed it, I'd recommend you give that a quick glance here:
The ultimate battery smartphone: Lenovo P770 unboxed and benchmarked

However, we didn't test the key selling point of this phone - the battery. It boasts of one of the largest batteries ever put in a mid-range smartphone (a whopping 3500mAh!). Now let's see how it fared. I'll also (briefly) cover the camera performance (hint: don't sell your digicam yet) and talk about the USB OTG function.

Battery tests:
I ran 3 tests to check the battery life: 720p HD video playback, 480p SD playback and MP3 music playback.

A) Video test: 720p HD playback:
* Test conditions: Flight mode-on, Brightness-low, stock player
I started a 2hr 20min 720p MP4 file with the battery life at 100%. At the end of the movie, the battery indicator had dropped down to 77%. This roughly translates to about 10 hours of HD video if nothing else is being used.

B) Video test: SD playback:
* Test conditions: Flight mode-on, Brightness-low, stock player
This involved playing a 2hr SD file with the phone completely charged. At the end of 2hours, the battery indicator was showing 88%. Extrapolating this would mean about 16 hours of SD video playback. (Again if nothing else was being played)

C) Music test: MP3 playback

* Test conditions: Flight mode-on, screen switched-off, stock player
This test involved running about 50 MP3 files (320kbps) in a repeat all loop for a bit more than a day. After about 25 hours of continuous playback that battery had dropped down to 71%. This roughly translated to about 86 hours or little more than 3.5 days on a single charge! Quite impressive!




P770 battery usage: MP3 playback
Battery verdict: Under test conditions, the phone battery fared quite well. Unfortunately, as I don't have comparative data from other phones in similar conditions, It remains to be seen if it really has the best battery life in the market.

 
Camera comparison:
The P770 has been a decent performer on the tests.. till now!

I decided to do a quick camera test along with Nexus 4 & iPhone 4. The Nexus 4 was scaled down to 5MP resolution to match the other phones. The images were taken in 3 conditions:

A) Indoor-diffused regular warm lighting, No flash, object @ 10inches:
The Lenovo P770 images appeared to have a blueish hue to them apart from the fact that they were a lot more grainier than the Nexus 4 & iPhone 4. (To be fair, the other 2 devices don't really compete at the price point of the P770)
Lenovo P770 Nexus 4 iPhone 4
B) Indoor-diffused regular warm lighting, Flash is on, object @ 10inches:
Oh.. my eyes... the horror. The blinding flash completely washed out the image on the P770. It may work for an object placed at a distance but if you are planning to take images of documents to email etc.. Forget it!
The iPhone 4 had amazing image clarity in this one while the Nexus 4 struggled with the focus.

(Left to Right) Lenovo P770 | Nexus 4 | iPhone 4

C) Outdoor, Flash is on, object @ 24inches: (images cropped below)
When there was sufficient light, the gap in the three reduced a bit. The P770 is still tad grainier than the Nexus & the iPhone seems to be in a different league altogether with the colors captured.
(Left to Right) Lenovo P770 | Nexus 4 | iPhone 4
 
@s_anuj - How's the quality of the earpiece during calls on your P770? I'm not sure if its with my handset or the entire model, the call quality in the headset/earpiece is quite poor. There seems to be some sort of muffling and the earpiece definitely, produces dry, unexpressive sound. Can you confirm?
Thanks!
 
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@s_anuj - How's the quality of the earpiece during calls on your P770? I'm not sure if its with my handset or the entire model, the call quality in the headset/earpiece is quite poor. There seems to be some sort of muffling and the earpiece definitely, produces dry, unexpressive sound. Can you confirm?
Thanks!

Testing the Nexus 4 at the moment. Will circle back to the P770 in a few days. I didn't face any problems earlier but will test it again. Have you applied the software update available?
 
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Thanks for the review - seriously considering buying one - Had one question though.
How is the headphone/mic? as in can i retain the mic and add a different headphone? (In my samsung, i have a 3 pin 3.5 jack which leads to a mic and a pin where i can insert a 2 pin headphone of my choice). Essentially i am asking if the i dont use their headphone attachment provided i wont have a mic?
 
Thanks for the review - seriously considering buying one - Had one question though.
How is the headphone/mic? as in can i retain the mic and add a different headphone? (In my samsung, i have a 3 pin 3.5 jack which leads to a mic and a pin where i can insert a 2 pin headphone of my choice). Essentially i am asking if the i dont use their headphone attachment provided i wont have a mic?

Nope. The mic is not separate. Frankly, I didn't even try the earphones that came with the phone. Didn't look great. I prefer using a BlueTooth instead
 
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