I’m somewhat more pleased with my purchase than the other reviewer.
At first it was a little disappointing to find that the phone was Dual SIM but with only the capacity to pick one SIM or the other via a reboot. Any thoughts you had of running one number for work and the other for leisure, or managing an affair flew straight out of the window!
Fortunately, thanks to information received via Ash, one of the other reviewers, I was able to upgrade the software version to make the phone Dual SIM/Dual Standby, which is what most people thought it would be in the first place. Why Lenovo didn’t go down this route at first is anyone’s guess. Maybe it’s an extra battery drain. I haven’t really measured that aspect.
I think the problem lies with the fact that there’s no’official’ place you can get accurate data since the phone isn’t intended for sale in the UK( in my experience, dual SIM jobs rarely are, after all, which network is going to sell you a phone that implies their own coverage is rubbish?)
Build-quality seems OK too for an all-plastic 5.5 screen phone and although it’s no iPhone-beater, it passes my’creak test’( I try to twist it!).
Mine’s working fine with a card from Three in the 4G slot and does indeed work in 4G when it can find it! The other slot, labelled 2G has my Giff-Gaff SIM on O2. The second slot really is 2G only - I’ve tested it with the Three SIM( 3 is a’data only’ network) and it doesn’t work.
Watch your prices. A perusal of e-bay will find examples as low as £103 but of course these will arrive by pigeon post from China some time next year after HM Customs have done their best to sit on it and charge you duty. I paid £145 from a firm in Bradford who also threw in a UK adapter, a gel case and an extra screen protector. It also means it’ll be cheaper to send back if warranty work is needed.
It wouldn’t be a good idea to make one of these your first Android phone as there are no English instructions whatsoever. The model isn’t even listed on Lenovo’s international web-site yet, and they don’t market phones in the UK, so the local site’s no use either. No headphones are included.
The screen is OK but nothing spectacular at 1280* 720, and at this size that’s proportionally about the same d.p.i. as my larger 7 Nexus tablet to give you an idea.
It has good compatibility with Play Store, and only two apps that I’ve used in the past can’t be used with it - don’t worry, nothing important like Facebook!
All in all it’s a lot of phone for the money.
It comes with a replaceable battery, so you won’t have to junk the phone once the battery stops holding its charge.
Minor niggles - there does not appear to be any form of notification or charging LED but Lenovo are not alone here - it’s just that I’d got used to an Xperia SP with a positive rainbow of the things!
It has an Antutu rating of over 27000, which is competent mid-range, and shows up for exactly it should, a Lenovo a916, so unlike the other reviewer, I don’t think it’s a’fake’. Cheap yes, fake, no.
When first delivered, the phone seemed to be in a’is it rooted or not?’ limbo. Yes Superuser was installed but no, the Root Checker app reckoned it wasn’t rooted. This was particularly annoying for me, as I wanted to run Three’s InTouch app which enables calls and texts to and from your number even when your only signal is from wi-fi. Guess what? It wouldn’t load on a’rooted’ phone. The presence of the Superuser app and its directory structure was throwing it off he scent and being something that could only be deleted on a - you guessed it - rooted phone, meant I was stuck with it.
As luck would have it, the firmware upgrade has replaced this with an official un-doctored version, and now Three InTouch works. My build-number version of Kitkat 4.4.2 is listed as A916_ S1205_ 141013 which I take to be a version from 13th October 2014. It might be an idea to make sure your supplier can tell you how new your potential build-number is, if you really want the dual standby facility.
You still get a degree of’Sino-Centric’ bloatware, but you’re mainly free to disable this, although you can’t un-install it. Every now and then a smidgin of Mandarin crops up, but it’s nothing serious. In fact if you alter Contacts not to show country of caller, it doesn’t show at all. It seems that you have to input the full+ 44 version of UK telephone numbers, otherwise your incoming calls and texts don’t seem able to give you caller name ID.
Oh yes, and since the firmware upgrade, I seem to have lost the ability to’auto-rotate’ jpegs and the like. Apps which force a landscape screen, like Netflix still work fine.
The only other minor cloud on the horizon is that it can’t handle 4G in the 800 band( remember that, the one that’s so close to Freeview it may need a filter?) This is a shame because the 800 band with its ability to penetrate as well as a TV signal was going to be the saviour of rural telephony( and broadband) . Still, how long does anyone keep a phone for these days - the idea of being’future-proof is rather old-fashioned in a cock-eyed kind of way!
AMENDED July 2015. Big problem - according to MalWareBytes, there are at least four nasties embedded in the Lenovo firmware, which under normal circumstances would be apps that can’t be deleted, although disabling them should help. However, a more final solution is to’root’ the phone although be warned this could invalidate your warranty if your phone locks up and therefore can’t be unrooted before sending it for repair. Rooting with the Kingo Root utility on your PC( a free download), and connecting your phone to the PC making sure that you have USB Debugging turned on in Developer Options( ask me if you can’t find this) was a doddle, almost a single click operation. Then you download the Titanium Back-Up app and delete the offending’bloatware’ files. Simples - well fairly’simples’ anyway