Lenovo Vibe X2 review: Rainbow of colors

Gallery

The gallery of the Vibe X2 has been heavily customized from the stock Android experience. It can either show all of your photos organized by date or a list of your albums. Tapping on a photo shows it in full screen. Sadly, you can't resize thumbnails using the pinch zoom gesture.

The gallery is a bit limited

Another missing feature is any form of gallery sorting. Whereas many rivals allow you to sort by folders, favorites, people faces or location, that's no possible on the Vibe X2.

You can edit photos on the fly

You can also go into a more capable editor with options for light and exposure adjustments (so you can bring out the shadows or the highlights), filters and beauty enhancements (which detects faces automatically).

Video player

The Vibe X2 packs a very capable video player that didn't stutter at playing every video codec we threw at it. It refused to play a video with AC3 audio, though.

The interface is marginally better than the gallery as it offers a few ways to sort the videos. There's also an editor, which allows you to stitch together a couple of videos. However, there's no subtitle support, which is a pity.

The video player interface

The video player comes with a neat trick allowing you to play the video in a floating window. You can resize it by a pinch zoom gesture, too.

Google Play Music spins up the party

Believe it or not, Lenovo hasn't bothered making its own Music app and is using the stock Google Play Music one. Not that this is a bad thing, though. It features Listen Now feature, which tries to determine what you like and the sequence of your track-changing so that it can start offering you music you might like to play next.

Google Play Music

Google Play Music also gives you the option to upload music onto the Google-branded cloud and stream it on your device via Wi-Fi or mobile data. There's also the nifty option of downloading the content onto the device if you want to have there for connection-less times.

From the Settings key you can get into the equalizer. It can be turned on and off and features several equalizer presets along with a custom user defined one. If you plug in a headset, you can also play around with the Bass boost and 3D effect sliders.

Audio output disappoints

The Lenovo Vibe X2 is hardly the most gifted musician around as shown by its performance in our dedicated test. The smartphone posted excellent scores in the part where it works with an active external amplifier, but even then its volume levels were really low so it wasn't all good.

Plug in a pair of headphones and things start to turn ugly with frequency response and dynamic range taking hits. Meanwhile distortion creeps in and also a fair amount of stereo crosstalk to round up a rather disappointing performance.

Lenovo Vibe X2 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.