Just in: Lenovo P2 hands-on

We have a soft spot for phones rocking a large battery and an efficient chipset. With its 5,100mAh power reserve and a 14nm Snapdragon 625, the Lenovo P2 arrives with a simple promise: it will last more than a solid day of usage.

One of the biggest complaints surrounding smartphones is their battery life. It’s just not what it used to be when the feature phones were king. And that’s to be expected considering how much more smartphones do for us. So Lenovo is right on the money with the P2 so far, but it’s hardly enough to win over people’s hearts.

The Lenovo P2 drops the Vibe moniker from its predecessor, which we’ll take as a sign of the company wanting to streamline the user’s experience. That’s evident right off the bat with the design. The phone has borrowed its design cues from the Vibe P1, but it feels more premium than the P1. However, the gold color doesn’t help it in this respect, as far as we’re concerned.

On the hardware side, we are pleasantly surprised that Lenovo has kept the slider button on the left side. As a refresher, it toggles the ultra battery power saving mode on or off. Sadly, you can’t customize it to do anything else.

Anyway, the P2 is lighter and slimmer, and now rocks a Super AMOLED screen instead of an IPS LCD one. By the way, the display is the same size, 5.5 inches and has kept the 1080p resolution. That’s right on the money for this kind of a mid-range offering.

The Snapdragon 625 simply flies on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow thanks to its octa-core 2.0 GHz Cortex-A53 CPU and 4GB of RAM. In terms of connectivity, things are alright with Bluetooth 4.1, USB OTG support and NFC. Sadly, Wi-Fi misses on the latest 802.11ac standard.

Lenovo hasn’t made a lot of changes on the back, particularly in the camera department. The 13MP snapper from the Vibe P1 is here again. We snapped a few samples to give you a taste of the camera’s capabilities.

Lenovo P2 camera samples

We’ll leave our judgment for the full review. Until then, you are welcome to ask any questions you might have about the Lenovo P2, and we’ll try and answer them.