Done with Lenovo Mobile Philippines' first smartphone with deca-core processor inside. Is the Lenovo K8 Note still worthy for it's Php 8,799 price tag?
On the physical looks, the series 5000 aluminum body of K8 Note is on great quality from it's touch down to the days that I handled it. Our first request was actually the venom black but still a good test for us to check the gold variant which left us with some little fingerprint smudges
The Lenovo-based UI which has almost stock Android Nougat inside was pretty good from navigation to multi tasking. There is quite a downer for me that for some reason, the phone does not allow me to sideload some apps which was rare from the huge of phones that I reviewed. I knew it's coming but there were some chores that I experienced some heat as from the recent history of smartphones produced with their choice of SoC - the Mediatek MT6797 10-core
On connectivity, Lenovo K8 Note was pretty good in calls, texts, mobile data, Bluetooth, WiFi and OTG support. It had one miss which is the inaccuracy in GPS.
The underrated wow factor for me of the K8 Note was the audio department as it was another rare case of a pretty good sounding Mediatek-powered phone on the 3.5 mm audio jack. The speaker is already given thanks to Dolby Atmos certification.
On benchmarks it almost got the 100k mark on Antutu with 96,000+. It has 10 point multi touch and it has 7 out of 9 working sensors including the basics and gyro sensor.
The K8 Note has 4,000 mAh battery which I can say even with that huge battery capacity, it can only worked for me for an entire day on heavy usage which means it is only on the average side of things thanks to that power-hungry processor and this one was made on a 28 nm architecture process. Good thing, the fast charger saved the day for us as the phone can go from 0 to 100% in around 2 hours
The cameras are a bit tricky in terms of usage. The second main cam is for the bokeh effect which I will not gonna recommend to use as it has some poor execution in it. The main shooter works well on auto but it had some obvious delays when I used either HDR or on pro mode. On selfies, the front flash worked very fine. It was very bright yet no teary eyes this time unlike on what happened to me on the Galaxy J7 Pro. The image processing speed on the front cam is also quiet slow that there were some instances that I will gonna have some blurred selfies or groufies.
Lenovo K8 Note rear camera samples
Lenovo K8 Note front camera sample (w/o flash)
Lenovo K8 Note front camera sample (w/ flash)
Previously, Lenovo K8 Note was at over Phgp 13,000 at it's small launch last November 2017 and it went down this April for Php 8,799. The price drop was huge yet there were some alternative choices at near it's SRP like OPPO A83 or the 3 GB RAM version of Redmi 5. Lenovo K8 Note might have the battery capacity, built and raw power but those two might win with the trending 18:9 display, power efficiency and better cameras. Lenovo K8 Note for me is at 3.5 out of 5