Lenovo Vibe S1: First Android phone with duo front facing camera

Lenovo has been aggressively launching smartphones in India and the recent addition to its portfolio is the Vibe S1, the world's first Android smartphone with duo front facing camera. (Text: Nidhi Singhal)

There is a metal frame running around the corners making it look premium and is available in two colours - white and blue. My review unit in white looked good but the blue variant looks classy.

The Lenovo Vibe S1 is a neatly crafted piece of hardware. It has a curved back with sleek slides and the centre measuring 7.8mm is at the thickest point. It doesn't feel heavy to hold either.

The 5-inch full HD display with 441 ppi is excellent. It offers rich colours, details and sharp texts. Viewing angles are good and it offers outdoor legibility.

Camera is the highlight. The Lenovo Vibe S1 has a 13-megapixel primary camera with dual-tone LED flash, along with a dual-camera setup in the front. The main front camera has an 8-megapixel sensor, and is supported by a second 2-megapixel sensor which detects depth-of-field. Both the front and the rear cameras are capable of recording video at full-HD resolution, and the front camera lets you use the depth-of-field capabilities to create some fairly unique picture effects.

The camera app is rich, full of manual settings too. The 13MP rear camera captures crisp images and is much superior in terms of quality when compared with the smartphones in the same price category. Even after zooming in, the images were sharp. It struggles a bit during low light imaging.

Highlight of the Vibe S1 is its front facing camera that does a good job. But an addition of a flash accompanying the selfie camera would have been better. There is a dual camera mode that needs to be turned on when you wish to use it. The image captured in this mode can be later used to blur the background. There are three modes for blurring the background, that adds a dramatic touch to the image.

Another interesting setting under selfie mode when the image is captured with dual camera is to get a cut-out after capturing the image. You can actually capture a selfie, cut out the face and impose it on some other image. Even this is very simple to use as there is an auto cut out feature. You can make a cutout manually using the features built into the app.

It runs on Android 5.0 with Vibe UI and has got 1.7GHz octa-core processor paired with 3GB of RAM and comes with 32GB internal storage. It manages to perform all the tasks smoothly.

This is a dual SIM smartphone with good connectivity and supports 4G connectivity on both the SIMs.

The Lenovo Vibe S1 can be easily used to enjoy multimedia content as well. The sound output is loud and impressive. However, at the full volume there is slight distortion. It has 2420 mAh non-removable battery managed to last a day with a couple of hours of calling, two push email accounts, Facebook, Twitter, Web Browsing, few other apps and a few minutes of camera.

Bag it or Junk it: For Rs 15,999, the Lenovo S1 Vibe is a great device for those who are looking for a stylish phone with good camera. It will compete against the recently launched OnePlus X. Plus: Design, Camera; Minus: Battery; Rating: 4.5/5