When you don’t’ have enough cash to buy an expensive smartphones and you just want a smartphone that looks good and priced affordably, this is what Lenovo has always been up to with their A series line up. The star of this review is a mid-ranger in the company’s A series line up – the A516.
Video Review
Lenovo A516 Hardware Specifications
Processor: MediaTek MT6572w 1.2GHz Dual Core
RAM: 512MB
Storage: 4GB ROM, expandable via MicroSD up to 32GB
Display: 4.5-inch IPS FWVGA (854×480) resolution
Camera: 5MP Rear, VGA Front Facing
Connectivity: Bluetooth 3.0, WiFi B/G/N, GPS, Dual SIM with HSPA+
Battery: 2000mAh
First Impressions
Considering this is an entry level smartphone, the phone has a really nice design. Although it isn’t the slimmest smartphone in the market, you can’t deny that the design is attractive with a charcoal grey color design on the back cover, combined with a light weight body and 4.5-inch display, the phone feels really nice to hold and you just don’t feel like putting down after taking It out of your pocket.
The 4.5-inch display isn’t the most gorgeous display out there, however Lenovo is kind enough to equip an IPS panel with a 854×480 resolution, it isn’t going to make pictures or text pop on the screen but good enough to not let such a display look too bad. While viewing angles are good, viewing the screen under strong sunlight can be a challenge. The bad thing here is that the screen’s touch response isn’t precise where swipe gestures can be difficult to manage if we are doing it too fast, this is quite annoying at times.
The User Experience
The phone comes with Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 and Lenovo’s launcher, the software experience is very similar to what you will find across Lenovo’s range of smartphones, it has the usual clunky and funky user interface that lets you change page transitions and the same icon design for default apps. We have to admit that we aren’t a fan of Lenovo’s launcher, it doesn’t look polished and useful at all in our daily lives, and we would prefer that Lenovo stick to the stock Android interface.
Due to the meagre 512MB RAM, the phone is terrible at running apps after the other, RAM utilization on the phone is pretty bad that it is simply impossible to switch to another app while maintaining the current one. Fortunately most apps run well on the phone, but we won’t dare to quit the app until we’re done with it. Furthermore, the experience can get really annoying when the phone freezes momentarily as it is trying to free up RAM, and app crashes do occur once the phone isn’t able to cope with it.
The overall user experience isn’t pleasant, even if we lower our expectations on it, the Lenovo A516 simply failed to make us love it.
Camera
Equipped with a 5 Megapixel sensor on the back with no autofocus and LED flash, we are neutral to the imaging quality of the camera. Pictures don’t look sharp and white balance can be inaccurate at times, color reproduction can be somehow boring though accurate. We accept the camera as our social camera for doing simple photography, but it isn’t going to replace our dumb point and shoot cameras, check out the pictures taken with the A516 down below.
Benchmarks and Battery Life
Despite our rants on how bad the phone performs, benchmark results are surprisingly good, but trust us, the phone only performs well if you are doing things very patiently. The phone scores 10525 in Antutu and 2799 in Quadrant, please take these numbers as reference only.
Battery life on the A516 isn’t amazing in our tests, though we really want to expect some good results from the 2000mAh battery after facing so many issues on it, the phone lasts about 13 hours with only light to medium weight tasks being performed, DualSIM standby and always on cellular data connection. We are really disappointed given that this isn’t a phone that uses high power components and a 2000mAh battery should basically offer lots of juice for it.
Verdict
We hate to say this, we don’t enjoy using the Lenovo A516 at all, the overall user experience and performance isn’t pleasant. In our opinion, it is worse than the A369 that we’ve reviewed recently. The Lenovo A516 retails at RM439, if you are patient enough, simply want a phone that has a huge screen, dual SIM capability and nice sturdy design, the Lenovo A516 could be your type of smartphone. One word to Lenovo, please don’t ever release phones with 512MB RAM again.
The Good:
+ Nice and sturdy design
+ Affordable price tag
+ 4.5-inch display just feels nice
+ Decent call quality
The Bad:
– Slow and sluggish performance
– Bad touch screen performance
– Average imaging quality
– Poor battery performance
– Unpolished user interface
– Probably stuck on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean
We rate the Lenovo A516 at 2 out of 5 stars.
