Lenovo PHAB Plus

Lenovo PHAB Plus

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Lenovo’s 6.8-inch Phab Plus shows how affordable smartphones are the big trend for this holiday season. While many companies are spinning expensive smartphones, Lenovo is delivering a big-screen experience for a very affordable AED 999.

We received the review unit a week ago and we have been playing with the device for a couple of days. Design-wise, it certainly echoes the iPhone 6 Plus design, with its metal case, rounded edges, black front, and silvery bezel.

Lenovo Phab Plus Back
Lenovo Phab Plus Back

The huge 6.8-inch, 1,920-by-1,080 screen means everything feels like it’s been blown up a little. The back, at least, looks less like an iPhone because of a plastic grille at the top that houses the antennas.

Specs here are fine for a device that’s available at a AED 999 price tag. The dual-SIM, dual-LTE phablet has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor, 2GB of RAM, MicroSD memory expansion, and a 3500mAh battery (considerably larger than the batteries in the 6 Plus or Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+.)

Lenovo Phab Plus Camera
Lenovo Phab Plus Camera

Lenovo has added their own skin on top of Android 5.0 here, but in general the functional skin is pretty light, except for one feature — a “one handed mode” which shrinks the display to about a quarter of the screen. You still can’t use it one-handed (it’s 3.8 inches wide) anyway, because you can’t actually hold it in one hand.

There’s a 13-megapixel main camera and a 5-megapixel front camera. It comes in silver, gold, or gray. Performance feels absolutely fine because the Snapdragon 615 isn’t being asked to push a super-high-resolution screen.

Lenovo Phab Plus One-Handed Mode
Lenovo Phab Plus One-Handed Mode

The device comes with an internal memory of 32GB though you can expand the storage capacity by adding a microSD card through to the microSD slot which also doubles up as a second Nano-SIM slot. As far as grip and comfort go, you really have to treat this device like a small tablet. The Phab Plus weighs 229-gms which is a lot for a phone. Holding it up to speak is awkward and uncomfortable after a few minutes.

In terms of performance, we did not notice any lag during our gaming sessions on the device. The cameras are the strong points of the PHAB Plus. The rear 13-megapixel camera was able to take some awesome shots, while the front 5-megapixel camera performed well during shooting selfies and video chat sessions.

The overall build quality is quite good. The Lenovo PHAB Plus is a very good entertainment device which can be used for surfing the web, for social media, playing games, listening to music and watching videos and movies.