Hands on with the Lenovo Vibe Shot

Lenovo introduced a couple of new smartphones and tablets at MWC 2015 yesterday, all offering something beyond what, from the outside, looks like fairly standard packaging. While the others focus on the audio experience with Dolby ATMOS on-board, the Lenovo Vibe Shot, as the name suggests, moves the emphasis to the camera experience it offers. We got to spend some time with the device, and here is our first look with the Lenovo Vibe Shot!

On the design front, it is understandable if you mistake the Vibe Shot for a slim point and shoot digital camera when looking at it from the back, obviously done on purpose to achieve that effect. The device offers a premium look and feel, with a metal frame sandwiched by two Corning Gorilla Glass 3 panels. For its specifications and price, the design language and build quality of the Vibe Shot is fantastic, and its compact size compared to the general size range of most smartphones nowadays allows for a great, comfortable handling experience.

On the hardware front, the Vibe Shot features a 5-inch IPS LCD display, with a resolution of 1920 x 1080, resulting in a pixel density of 441 ppi. The display is very vibrant and with a good color saturation, and should provide a great viewing experience overall.

Under the hood, the Lenovo Vibe Shot packs a 1.7 GHz octa-core 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor, backed by the Adreno 405 GPU and 3 GB of RAM, which should be more than enough to keep everything running smoothly. 32 GB of internal storage is available, further expandable via microSD by up to 128 GB. Lastly, the device packs a rather large 2,900 mAh battery, which comfortably allows for more than a full day of use.

The Vibe Shot runs Android 5.0 Lollipop out of the box, and while it’s great to have the latest iteration of Android on-board, the user interface features nothing that will remind you of a stock Android experience, with the highly-customized Vibe UI on top.

Finally, we come to what is expected to be the biggest selling point of the Lenovo Vibe Shot, the camera experience. It’s not just the look that Lenovo is trying to recreate with the Vibe Shot, but the overall picture taking experience itself, with the availability of a dedicated tactile shutter button placed at the right spot, and a physical toggle to switch between “Smart” and “Pro” modes. On the specifications front, the device comes with 16MP auto-focus rear-facing camera with a 6-piece modular lens, an infra-red auto focus, tricolor flash, OIS, and 16:9 BSI sensor, while the front-facing camera is a 8 MP unit, which should allow for some good high-quality selfies.

The Smart mode is basically akin to an auto mode, and adjusts the settings of the camera the best that it can to cater the shot, allowing you to just focus on taking the shot. The Pro mode, on the other hand, puts everything in your control, giving you the ability to manually adjust all the settings including ISO, white balance, aperture, shutter speed, and even depth of field, all things that you would expect from a normal camera.

So there you have it – a quick look at the Lenovo Vibe Shot! While it is too early to comment on the quality of images, the camera-centric nature of this smartphone does leave us very excited to put it through its paces.

Stay tuned with Android Authority as we continue to bring you more from Lenovo, as well as more great coverage from MWC 2015!