Lenovo S90 Sisley review: Under cover

Introduction

The Lenovo S90 Sisley wants to be many things at once and one up every possible rival in the crowded midrange. An AMOLED screen, an 8MP selfie cam complete with an LED flash, Dual-SIM and LTE in a package powered by Snapdragon 410 and designed by Apple but not in California.

Lenovo obviously saw no need to invest heavily in the Sisley, which mostly inherits its hardware from the Vibe Z2. In fact, they simply went ahead and re-packaged the Z2, most probably for markets where the origins of the otherwise sharp unibody design wouldn't be taken the wrong way.

Lenovo S90 Sisley press images

As for what's under the hood, the Lenovo S90 Sisley isn't likely to disappoint its target audience. The chipset is the increasingly popular Snapdragon 410, with four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.2GHz and Adreno 306 GPU. The camera setup is quite impressive, at least on paper, with a 13MP main shooter and an 8MP selfie cam with its own LED flash. The S90 comes in two main hardware setups: a 16GB model with 1GB of RAM and a 32GB version, with 2GB of RAM. The display is a 5-inch 720p Super AMOLED unit.

Key features

• 5.0" 16M-color 720p Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen
• Android OS v4.4.4 KitKat with Vibe UI 2.0
• Quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A53; Qualcomm MSM8916 Snapdragon 410, Adreno 306
• Dual SIM (Micro-SIM, dual stand-by)
• 1GB/2GB of RAM
• 13MP camera with 1080p video recording @ 30fps
• 8MP front-facing camera with AF, LED flash and 720p video recording
• 16GB/32GB of built-in storage
• LTE Cat. 4 (150Mbps), Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/, GPS/GLONASS receiver, Bluetooth v4.0, FM Radio
• Standard 3.5mm audio jack
• Accelerometer and proximity sensor
• Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
• 2,300mAh non-removable battery

Main disadvantages

• No microSD
• Non-removable battery
• 16GB version has a single gig of RAM
• Design is a blatant rip-off

Lenovo is taking a completely different approach with the S90 Sisley compared to the fairly recent Vibe X2. Technically, both of them are midrangers, though obviously not in the same price bracket and not after the same target audience. The original, layered design of the Vibe X2 goes well with the Full-HD screen and more powerful octa-core CPU.

The Sisley on the other hand, is powered by a more modest chipset but boasts a high-res selfie cam and an AMOLED screen. Whatever the reasoning behind their choice of design, some of the specs are perhaps a direct response to specific competitors like Samsung and Sony.

Lenovo S90 Sisley live images

These will be named and blamed in due time but not before we've looked at the Lenovo S90 Sisley from all possible sides. Coming up next is the usual unboxing and hardware checkup.