Lenovo K3 Note Review: Gets Quite a Lot Right

The Lenovo K3 Note is an incremental update, and fixes some things that were wrong with the A7000. The speakerphone is louder with the help of Dolby Atmos (on its own, its still quite weak), the display has got a resolution bump, cameras have improved significantly as has battery-life and this one doesn't heat-up during calls nor while gaming. But everything's not that rosy, there is quite a lot of throttling here when it comes to high-end gaming, after a few minutes of continuous gameplay you will start to see frame drops and lag. In general performance however, its not noticeable. The capacitive navigation buttons are still not backlit and the build could have been slightly better. Then there's the SAR value which has got everyone in a tizzy, 1.59 W/Kg for Head (0.688 for Body). What people fail to realize is that this is the maximum SAR value when all the radios of the phone including LTE/Cellular, Bluetooth, WiFi, FM Radio are running at full power, which would never be the case in general usage. Nevertheless, Lenovo could've explained it better in their manual/quick start guide. Overall the K3 Note is a good choice in this price segment, but doesn't bring anything exciting to it.

Score Breakdown

• Build and Design
  7.5
• Display
  8.4
• Network Reception & Call Quality
  8.4
• Camera(s)
  8.4
• Music & Video Playback
  8.2
• Gaming
  6.5
• Performance
  8.2
• Battery-life
  8.2
• Software
  8.3
• Total Score
  8.0 10.0