BERLIN—Lenovo's 6.8-inch Phab Plus shows how affordable smartphones are the big trend for this holiday season. While Samsung spins out $800 Galaxy S6 Edge+ units and Apple slings $749 iPhone 6S Pluses, Lenovo is delivering a big-screen experience for $299 or less. There's only one catch—we won't be able to use it here in the U.S.
That's okay: we're getting the Moto X Style tomorrow, and I couldn't be more excited for a premium $399 phablet that works on all four U.S. carriers.
I played with the Phab Plus anyway, because Lenovo is a big deal in the rest of the world. It certainly echoes the iPhone 6 Plus design, with its metal case, rounded edges, black front, and silvery bezel. The huge 6.8-inch, 1,920-by-1,080 screen means everything feels like it's been blown up a little, just like on the iPhone 6 Plus. The back, at least, looks less like an iPhone because of a plastic grille at the top that houses the antennas.
Specs here are fine for $299. The dual-SIM, dual-LTE phablet has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor, 2GB of RAM, MicroSD memory expansion, and a 3500mAh battery (considerably larger than the batteries in the 6 Plus or Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+.) There's a 13-megapixel main camera and a 5-megapixel front camera. It comes in silver, gold, or gray. Performance feels absolutely fine because the Snapdragon 615 isn't being asked to push a super-high-resolution screen.
Lenovo messed with the icons on Android 5.0 here, but in general the functional skin is pretty light, except for one almost comical feature—a "one handed mode" which shrinks the display to about a quarter of the screen. You still can't use it one-handed (it's 3.8 inches wide) anyway, because you can't actually hold it in one hand. But that's fine! You're getting this thing because it's huge.
The company also announced an even less expensive Phab with an even bigger battery: it's a 7-inch phone with a 1,280-by-720 display and a gigantic 4250mAh battery, for $179. It comes in black, white, red, and blue, and has a colorful, jaunty plastic casing.
At home in Asia, Lenovo is fending off a huge number of phablet-sized devices from respectable vendors like Xiaomi and Meizu for under $200; there's a lot less of a market for those things here, so we don't see very many of them hit the U.S.
The Phab Plus isn't worth importing, because it's banded to exclude the U.S. It lacks any U.S. LTE bands, which means even if you get hold of one, it'll be a lousy experience in the U.S. But the Phab Plus is worth noting because it shows Samsung's greatest challenge: keeping its Android phone prices high in the face of much cheaper, good-enough competition.
For more information visit: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2490254,00.asp
Source: pcmag.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment