Lenovo P2

If you find your phone battery is dying off quickly, the Lenovo P2 wants to impress you for your next upgrade by offering a full three days of battery.

That’s a lot of life, especially considering most modern smartphones struggle to last an intensive full day.

But the Lenovo P2 also isn’t skimping on the other features a phone needs in 2017, and it offers all this up at a low price. 

Lenovo P2 price and release date 

The Lenovo P2 is out now in the UK, but there’s no word on whether it will launch in the US or Australia in the future.

In the UK it’s an exclusive to Three and the network is selling it for £199.99. Deals for the phone start at £18 a month with no upfront cost, 500MB of data and 300 minutes.

Design and display 

Considering the low price of the Lenovo P2, it feels like a remarkably high-end phone when you first pick it up. This is only a touch more expensive than the Lenovo-owned Motorola's Moto G4 Plus, but unlike that phone, the P2 manages to boast a full metal unibody design.

It looks great and feels good in the palm of the hand. It is large though at 153 x 76 x 8.3mm, so those with smaller hands may struggle to get a solid grip of the P2.

It’s worth highlighting that Lenovo has managed to make the phone just 8.3mm thick. The iPhone 7 is praised for being thin at 7.1mm, so this phone doesn’t feel all that much thicker, despite having a much bigger battery inside.

On the left hand edge of the phone there's a power button and volume rocker, while on the opposite side you'll find a little switch. You may think this is like a silence switch on an iPhone, but it’s actually to enable Power Saving Mode.

Activate it and the P2 will dial back the power, offering up only its key features. Six features are included as standard, including phone, contacts and SMS, but you can add in other features as well.

This is a mode that could come in useful when you’re travelling and know you will be without charge for some time. When we flipped the switch our P2 was at 77%, but in battery saver mode the phone was predicting a whole 72 hours of life.

On the front of the Lenovo P2 there's a bright 5.5-inch Full HD display, equalling 401 pixels-per-inch. You aren’t likely to get a better resolution screen on a phone at this price in 2017 and it’s a great choice if you’re looking for a screen to play movies on.

There's also a fingerprint scanner below the screen, but we've yet to test it out properly.

Specs and OS

The Lenovo P2 packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 system-on-a-chip, a setup which we previously saw on both the Huawei Nova and the Moto Z Play, and we weren’t enamored with its performance on either of those phones.

Here it’s paired with either 3GB or 4GB of RAM - depending on if you go for the 32GB or 64GB version of the phone. Those other handsets only had 3GB of RAM, so opt for the extra gigabyte and the P2 may be more capable than them.

Even then this obviously isn't the most powerful handset around, but it should be able to stand up to other choices around the £200 mark. From our brief testing it felt slick, but we'll put it through its paces with gaming and apps in our full review.

There’s Android 6 Marshmallow software here but there’s no word of when the latest Android 7 software will make its way to the P2.

There are also a lot of bloatware apps on the phone, but but most of them can be deleted.

For the camera there's a 13MP on the rear and a 5MP shooter on the front.

The big highlight of the Lenovo P2 is the battery though. We’ve yet to test it, but will be sure to give it a proper push for our full review. It’s a 5,100mAh battery cell and Lenovo's said it will last three whole days - which is a big claim.

For example the Moto G4 Plus, a phone that also has a 5.5-inch Full HD display, has a 3,000mAh battery while Apple's iPhone 7 has a 1,960mAh cell.

A lot of manufacturers make battery claims and don't manage to live up to them, but the juice pack here is a lot bigger than the batteries in most phones, so it’ll be interesting to see how it does.

Early verdict

The P2 may be the phone that makes Lenovo a go-to cheap phone brand alongside Motorola.

With solid specs, a great design and all of the features you need in a budget phone the P2 has already impressed us.

In fact, the Lenovo P2 currently feels a little too good to be true, so we can't wait to see how this awesome sounding battery and other features turn out in our full review.

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