Lenovo S890 Review

Lenovo’s focus might be still on notebooks, but the company does have some interesting mobile solutions that have gone unnoticed by many. We first brought to you the S880 at the beginning of the year, which turned out to be a good handset but a tad overpriced for the performance it offered. Today, we have its successor – the S890 – that plugs most of the gaps left by its predecessor and is priced in competition with Samsung’s Galaxy Grand. 

Design and build 

The S890 follows the same candy bar design as the S880 but has a slimmer bezel; Lenovo has also gotten rid of the double chin at the bottom. The handset has a pleasing design and the glossy plastic shell does a good job of masking fingerprints. The phone has a chrome trim running along the sides, which does not look that tacky since it has a matte finish. The phone is slightly heavier than the Grand, at 176 gms, but is slimmer. The volume rocker is easy to reach but the power button is not. Luckily, you won’t be using that very often since the flip-cover that comes bundled with the phone automatically toggles the screen on and off when open or closed.

On the back, we have an 8MP camera with an LED flash while a single speaker grille sits at the bottom. The S890 is a dual-SIM phone with only one of the slots supporting 3G. You even get a hot-swappable microSD card slot.

Features
Let’s start with the display. The S890 features a 5-inch screen just like the Grand, but it does better by offering a higher 540 x 960 resolution and an IPS panel in lieu of standard TFT. The colours are fairly punchy but not very vibrant or sharp. Sunlight legibility is not very good either. The screen tends to get washed out quite a bit, making it really difficult to use. The phone runs on a heavily skinned version of Jelly Bean 4.1.1. Despite this, the phone is very quick and snappy with no lag. You’ll notice minor slowdowns once in a while, but it’s nothing drastic. Just like the S880, the skin will take some getting used to, but once you do, it’s extremely functional and there are shortcuts for literally everything.

For starters, we have a whole bunch of toggle switches in the notification bar,. The homescreen widget gives you quick access to most used apps, you can easily close running apps to free up some RAM and all of this is presented in a very novice-friendly manner. We really liked the theme and the way the icons and menu are designed. The S890 is powered by a MediaTek MT6577T, which is a dual-core SoC running at 1.2GHz. The CPU is fairly powerful for handling media up to 720p as well as popular apps. The PowerVR SGX531 GPU is not too powerful, however, as it returned a low NenaMark 2 score of just 24fps. Despite this, games like Temple run 2 and Subway Surfers run just fine. 

Media 

Media playback is handled via the stock player, which supports MP3 and FLAC. Audio quality is good, provided you have a decent pair of IEMs. The speaker volume is not too bad either as alerts and notifications can be heard even in a noisy environment. FM radio is also present.

The video player supports MKV, AVI, MOV and MP4 formats, but only up to 720p. Full HD 1080p files show up but don’t play. Audio through the rear speaker is fairly loud and is clearly audible. You get 4GB of internal memory along with the ability to expand it up to 32GB via a microSD card slot.