Ladies and gents, meet Caroline.

[huckleberrypie]

I wouldn’t go too long-winded on this one, but here’s what I have to say with the Lenovo A369i my aunt and I picked up at the store.

The phone’s cheap. As in ridiculously cheap. Yet the lads who made this thing shoved in a MediaTek 6572 SoC on it - 1.3Ghz dual core, ARMv7 with 512MB RAM (of which 300-something is reserved for the system, and the rest for the Mali-400 GPU afaik). Antutu benchmarks place it at around 10k, which is pretty much along the same league as Samsung’s Galaxy S II. GTA3 works, San Andreas works, and it’s fluid enough for users to play around with. Build quality-wise, it does feel plasticky, but other than some subtle flaws it feels solid and doesn’t look like it came from a shanzhai sweatshop.

Lenovo didn’t skin the phone much other than some icons and a proprietary launcher* - pretty much everything else is an AOSP-esque affair. It did come with some bloatware, like Norton Mobile Security, some casual fishing game and UC Browser, as well as the usual social stuff like Twitter and Facebook.

They did cut some corners, though, which accounts for the PHP3890 price (it originally retailed for 4,499). There’s no GPS, for one, just some ersatz version i.e. Assisted GPS aka network location services - don’t expect Instagram or some other app that depends on GPS to work properly, but why should I care about IG? Battery life’s a bit of a drag, as Wifi can drain the phone’s juice at a significant rate. Camera is also meh at best - just a somewhat muddled 2MP snapper typical with cheapo devices.

Overall it’s an OK device - it won’t beat a Galaxy S5, of course, but it’s good for messing around and stuff like that.

* - The one on the pic is an Xperia launcher I installed. Didn't really like how Lenovo's launcher looked like, so I ditched it in favour of Sony's.

[cpd2009]

A well written review. Good reading. As for me, Hazel shall be my go-to Android device, so no need for a smartphone at the present time. She scores in the 9000 range, which is somewhat low compared to the latest and greatest Android devices, and she also has an entirely custom TouchWiz UI made by Samsung, but it still retains a bit of that standard Android look and feel.

As for your phone... two things. For one, do you have the name of that casual fishing game? I want to see if I can find it on Google Play for some odd reason.

Secondly... Instagram. I really don't get what Instagram is supposed to be. Is it a photosharing site like Flickr or is it selfie central?

[huckleberrypie]

A well written review. Good reading. As for me, Hazel shall be my go-to Android device, so no need for a smartphone at the present time. She scores in the 9000 range, which is somewhat low compared to the latest and greatest Android devices, and she also has an entirely custom TouchWiz UI made by Samsung, but it still retains a bit of that standard Android look and feel.

As for your phone... two things. For one, do you have the name of that casual fishing game? I want to see if I can find it on Google Play for some odd reason.

Secondly... Instagram. I really don't get what Instagram is supposed to be. Is it a photosharing site like Flickr or is it selfie central?

Yeah, it's modest at best, but it seems to suit my needs for now.

The casual fishing game I'm referring to is Fishing Joy.

Instagram's a social photo-sharing service, and it allows people (especially hipsters and kiddies) to share whatever stuff they snapped, apply sepia or brown filters on it, and post them in public. Never cared about it if you ask me.