Lenovo Vibe X2 Hands-on, Initial Impressions and Photo Gallery

Lenovo acquiring Motorola hasn’t shifted its focus from the company’s own smartphone lineup, especially in the Vibe series. As they launch the Vibe X2 smartphone in India, after the recent announcement during the IFA 2014 event in Berlin, they expand the lineup with this smartphone claimed to have the fastest chipset in the world. At least what the benchmark scores said.

But, is the Lenovo Vibe X2 any good? It indeed is thin, very light and the colored layers look pretty cool, but this is far from being called the best in the market. But at the same time, comparing with the earlier smartphones from the company, this one surely has not taken any inspiration from the predecessors. It has a fresh look, the very comfortable-to-hold design, and the UI is quite different, although not the best for me.

To start off, the colors are interesting, and there are 3 layers, of which the top screen layer is about a millimeter narrower in width and height than the two layers behind it. Lenovo has integrated the colored layers so well that the buttons, slot for SIM cards and the ports are all well integrated. Doesn’t that look like the Project Ara prototype? it does have that look on the side, but all that is limited only to the side frame, and the back cover of the device has a single color, and there’s only a camera with flash on the back.

On the front, the display looks brilliant with vibrant colors, and the brightness is quite good as well but under the sunlight, it did look dull. On the front, there is an earpiece with a 5-megapixel camera on the top, and the three touch buttons are seen below the display, so Lenovo’s giving the full 5-inch screen space for the content, and not keeping anything on the screen.

The Vibe X2 is running Android 4.4.2 KitKat OS, and the Vibe UI is layered over it pretty well. It looks neat, but I’m not a big fan of those interfaces without a proper app drawer section, but still, this like the MIUI has proper options to have apps and widgets together. The notification panel is interesting, and has an Android 5.0-like quick settings, the section has to be dragged down to expand fully and give more settings.

The pre-installed apps are quite cool and some which you would have used some alternatives for, in the future. These include SHAREit, SECUREit, SYNCit, SNAPit and CLONEit. The 13-megapixel camera on the back does capture decent photos, and on the initial use, I liked the way it was quickly focusing on the objects. And the camera app itself has loads of options to play around with, and that would be shown in the camera review, very soon. As much as I liked the rear camera, the front one was the reverse of that, especially due to the fixed focus. And, there was some excess and unnecessary brightening seen, although that might have been done to make the selfies better, and it went the wrong way to make the pictures look unnaturally bright.

So overall, for the price of Rs. 19999, this is a phone we would recommend although the 2300 mAh battery isn’t tested yet, and the connectivity options as well have to be checked and tested before we give a final word about the Vibe X2. It is very comfortable, light and good in the hand.