5 Reasons not to buy the Lenovo K3 Note Smartphone

It was 25th June when the Lenovo K3 Note was launched in India, following which they had announced the first flash sale exclusively on Flipkart. The sale received 538,096 registrations & Lenovo India had 47,440 units for sale following which I bought a unit for review paying additional Rs 90 for “In-a-day Guarantee Delivery”. The unit was delivered on 9th which is when I had started using it as a primary phone and came to the following feedback on why you shouldn’t purchase this Smartphone.

Using the @Lenovo_in K3 Note from over a week!
Bad : call quality, Low Speakers output Hangs regularly, Bad UI.
Decent battery & price.

— Amit Bhawani (@amitbhawani) July 17, 2015

Performance

The Lenovo K3 Note is definitely a device which is over praised primarily for the price without even testing the unit and many reviewers gave it a top rating just based on the specifications. Remember specifications mean nothing if the actual performance is not good, which is the reason you need to actually wait for the reviews from the experts to know more. Starting from the app switching to playing games, everything hangs and which is what I had showcased Live through the Periscope application, which you can still watch it.

LIVE on #Periscope: Lenovo K3 Note Issues. Why it's not Recommended. #fb https://t.co/sMbQPbEoMJ

— Amit Bhawani (@amitbhawani) July 21, 2015

Battery

The device comes with a Li-Po 3000 mAh battery which should easily last more than a day on paper, but in actual it didn’t go through the day. Again I would not consider myself a power user but a moderate user, since I use WhatsApp Web & Push bullet to get all the notifications to my desktop, saving the time spent on mobile. During the night, the phone’s battery gets drained by 20% while the Wifi is OFF & the data connectivity is also switched OFF. It literally makes no sense charging the phone every few hours and especially one which comes with a large capacity & is very slow in charging.

Speakers

Lenovo has been promoting their recent smartphones with Dolby Atmos which works only when hearing with an earphone, but if you play music through the speakers you will certainly be disappointed. It is the worst speakers ever since the sound wobbles and the output was very low when the phone is placed in any position.

RAM

I have had tested many smartphones which come with 2GB RAM and most of them had 1 – 1.2 GB of available RAM to the user which helped them in easily switch between apps and also play performance intensive games. The situation is different on this phone since the available RAM is just around 500 – 600 MB RAM even when you close all the applications running in the background. Again it’s not just about this

RAM is very important to ensure you get a good performance but if the system resources and applications take up 75% of the available resources then the experience is certainly going to be very bad.

Call Quality

I have been using my Airtel connection from 14 years now and have been having different experiences all the time, but when I started using the same on the K3 Note, it was hard to listen what the other person was speaking. There have been similar experiences from few other budget centric devices, but the same was least expected from the K3 Note.

Bonus: Here are a few issues raised by others who tweeted them to me.

• High SAR Value, In India it’s limited to max 1.6/1 gm, while this phone has 1.590 which is almost not acceptable.
• Very Slow Charging
• Heats up a lot while making Normal Phone calls above 10 minutes or a quick Video Call
• Battery hard to remove for inserting a SIM Card

This does not stop here, on July 17th ie.. around a week post the testing, I created a replacement request with Flipkart, asking them to send me another unit to check if the above-mentioned issues are device specific. They canceled the same without any clarification which confuses me on the return policy they offer. I tweeted to them directly, but it’s sometimes the seller to be blamed rather than the marketplace and, in this case, its Lenovo India who should at least respond to these issues & get the problem fixed.

Note: I did receive a call from the Lenovo India’s PR agency, but there has been no follow up on the issue and I have been trying to get a replacement from Flipkart as a consumer & not contacting my contacts at Lenovo to get it resolved. It’s a pity that a consumer has to go through all this and still get no resolution even after a week, after which their return / replacement may be void.

PS: If you have purchased this Phone, let us know with your experience be it positive or negative in the comments section below.