Lenovo S880 Hands-on

The Lenovo P880. 5-inch Dual SIM Android 4.0 Smartphone. Boom.

Hands-on with the Lenovo S880

A few days ago we wrote about the Lenovo S880, a 5-inch Dual SIM Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Smartphone that retails for around Php15,000. Today we’re sharing our initial hands-on experience with it! Lenovo Philippines was kind enough to send us a review unit that we can play around with for two weeks so we’ll definitely put this through the paces and have a more comprehensive review later on. Unfortunately we couldn’t do an unboxing since the unit came in bubble wrap, hehe.

Before we go to the hands-on let’s do a quick refresher on the specifications.

Lenovo S880 Spec Sheet

1GHz CPU, MT6575 Processor
512MB RAM, 4GB ROM
755MB Internal Storage + 1.85GB USB Storage, expandable up to 32GB via micro-SD
5-Megapixel Camera and VGA front-facing camera
Burst Mode up to 16 Shoots, Panorama Mode
3G/HSPA
USB and Bluetooth Tethering
Portable WLAN Hotspot
Wireless FM Radio, FM Transmitter
Dual-SIM Dual Standby
Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
2250 mAh battery

It’s big, fast, and uh… did I already say that it’s big?

What will immediately grab your attention with the Lenovo S880 is its 5-inch capacitive multi-touch display. It’s slightly smaller than the Samsung Galaxy Note (measures at 5.3-inches) but bigger than the Galaxy S3 (4.8-inches). Despite the size of the screen it’s still quite slim measuring 142.0 x 78.0 x 9.9 mm.

As for the display, it’s WVGA with a resolution of 800×480 pixels. It’s no retina display or Super AMOLED Plus but it pretty much delivers above average image and text quality. Not bad really for the Php15,000 price tag.

The body is made primarily from a mix of metal, glass, and plastic, which is a departure from the P700 or the A65. It feels solid in your hand but it might be a little unwieldy if you have small hands, hehe. There’s no built-in stylus with this so you’ll primarily be using your fingers for the S880.

The ports and buttons are found in their usual spots. The headphone jack, sleep/wake, and mini-USB port are at the top. The volume rocker can be found on the side. The back plate is removable and this is where you slot in the SIM Cards and the micro SD card. Note that the first SIM card is the only one capable of running 3G. The second slot is limited to 2G.

The rear-facing camera can be found at the back (5-megapixel) and the VGA front facing camera is at the top of the screen. One thing I appreciate about the Lenovo S880 as well is the placement of the speakers. Unlike other smartphones which usually put it at the back, they set it up at the front at the edge of the bottom. This makes watching movies or TV series on this while you’re at bed with no earphones more feasible.

Runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Flawlessly

Based on our initial testing, the 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM is more than enough to run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on this device without any major lags or hiccups. Of course the machine will bog down a bit if you have live wall papers running alongside widgets on all the screens (even the quad-core Galaxy S3 won’t be able to do that smoothly).

Lenovo customized it a bit with some sort of skin that includes a non-removable widget that highlights Google apps. I’m trying to figure out if I can change what apps are highlighted but as of this writing I haven’t found that yet.

Dual SIM, Dual Standby FTW

Lenovo is definitely putting their chips on dual sim and dual standby technology. They had that feature with the entry level A65, the midrange P700, and now with the S880. It’s so fascinating to hold a phone as big as this and see that it runs two sim cards, hehe.

Two signals running. You can see at the top the two signal bars.

So far, so good!

We’ve only been playing with the Lenovo S880 for a day but we’re pretty impressed with it! The software runs well, the build is solid, and it doesn’t look cheap at all. The dual sim dual standby execution is also great to have. All of this for just Php14,999 screams VALUE. Full review coming soon!