Budget is where it’s at with smartphones these days as only a limited number of people have the money to fork out tonnes of cash to pick up a premium flagship smartphone. Lenovo isn’t a stranger to this market and they’ve recently released two more additions into the budget smartphone spectrum — the Vibe K5 and Vibe K5 Plus.
Packing a not-at-all unreasonable spec sheet, the Lenovo Vibe K5 and K5 Plus are pretty decent options in the low-end of the market. The better spec-ed Vibe K5 Plus gets a 5-inch 1080p full HD display at the front while being powered by a Snapdragon 616 octa-core processor on the inside mated with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of expandable storage (microSD up to 32GB).
Keeping everything running is a 2,750 mAh removable battery, which should delight power users. For optics, it gets a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 5MP front-facing snapper for selfies. It will support dual SIM and be LTE enabled.
On the Software side, Lenovo is streamlining their skin of Android 5.1.1 Lollipop to remove the excess and keep everything running smoothly — important when you consider they have to rely on a Snapdragon 616. It is unfortunate that it doesn’t come with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, though, but we hope that it will receive an update somewhere down the line.
Other goodies include a Dolby Atmos sound software plus two rear-facing speakers and a relatively nice build with good use of metal — something that is still relatively rare at this end of the market. The lower-end K5 simply drops the processor down to an octa-core Snapdragon 415 and the full HD display goes down to an HD display.
Based on its asking price of USD149 (USD129 for the regular K5), which translates to around RM625, these smartphones’ biggest competitors look to be the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 — which has prices starting from RM699 in DirectD.
What do you guys think about these entry level devices? Are they enough to tempt you? Let us know in the comments section below.
