I Bought Myself a Lenovo P780 Phone

I’d wanted to buy this phone back in the summer, choosing from the current models from UMI, Zopo, THL, ZTE, JIA YU and others built around a quad-core MTK. Its price wasn’t much different from the competition: 8,000 rubles, and this was the seller. By the way, this phone is sold at Svyaznoy and MegaFon for 13,000, but everything is in Russian, it comes with a warranty, and the charger has a European plug.

Also, just before buying it, I was eyeing the Nexus 4, which cost 200 USD at the time, but it had a weak battery, only one SIM slot, and no memory card slot. Otherwise, it had a better CPU and GPU. Delivery wasn’t straightforward either; it would have cost me quite a bit in both money and time.

Reasons why I chose the Lenovo P780:

• I trust the brand, since I have one of their laptops
• A reasonably up-to-date Android 4.2.1, on which WebSockets at least work
• A 4000 mAh Li-Po battery that lasts me 2–4 days of active use. For comparison, iPhones currently have 1420 mAh Li-Po batteries, while the average Android device has 2200 mAh
• A Mediatek MT6589 processor (Quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7). Lenovo also includes its own software for managing the processor cores: it usually uses one core at ~400 MHz, and when more resources are needed, it brings up to four cores online at 1200 MHz
• PowerVR SGX544 graphics
• Two active full-size SIM cards (though only one slot supports 3G, which is perfectly fine with me). Hot-swapping is supported, without rebooting the phone
• GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, HSUPA, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n (dual-band, Wi-Fi hotspot)
• GPS works great
• microSD support (I have a 32GB card installed)
• A 5.0-inch IPS LCD display (720x1280)
• The touchscreen supports up to 10 touch points
• OTG (USB On-the-go), which lets you connect a keyboard, USB flash drives, and other phones as flash drives (you can even charge other phones)
• They say it has Corning Gorilla Glass 2, though I haven’t looked for confirmation; it certainly looks that way
• A powerful LED camera flash that I use as a flashlight

I scored 13518 points in AnTuTu Benchmark.

The downsides include:

• Of the 4GB of internal storage, 1.3GB is available (Android took the rest). A memory card makes up for this, of course, but an extra 4GB still wouldn’t hurt
• Only 1GB of RAM, though so far that’s more than enough for me
• An 8 MP rear camera (3264x2448, with autofocus), but the image quality is much worse than the Nexus 4’s
• The front camera is only good for Skype

The full specifications are on GSMArena. There’s a more or less complete review on Habr.

Some Photos

Besides the phone itself, the package includes a headset (as headphones they’re pretty mediocre, of course, but as a headset they’re very good; I especially liked that they work with my laptop too), an OTG cable, and a charger. On top of that, as a gift, the seller applied a screen protector for me (which I removed after two weeks) and threw in a silicone bumper case.

I bought it in China, so my charger has a Chinese plug, like this:

OTG in action:

It’s quite a shovel of a phone:

The photos are taken from that same article on Habr.

Battery Problem

After the phone arrived, I kept running into the same problem: it would repeatedly turn itself off. I wrote to the seller about it, and he was sure it was a firmware issue. Later I managed to reproduce it and posted about it on 4pda, but I got no help at all there.

I spent a lot of time searching online for similar problems, but found nothing. At some point it stopped turning on, so I took the phone apart, removed the battery, and recorded a video showing that there was no power at the contacts.

After that, I took it to the Samtel repair shop on Muzhestva Square, near my home. They fixed the battery for 150 rubles, and it’s been working without interruption ever since. Hats off to that repair shop!