Lenovo K5 brings impressive smartphone specs for just £129

Lenovo K5

The Lenovo K5 is 'officially' coming to the UK - and it's bringing some very impressive specs for a rather low price indeed.


Costing just £129, the phone offers 5-inch Full HD screen, Dolby Atmos integration for improved sound, a slender frame at just 8.2mm thick and a 13MP camera on the rear of the phone.

It's encased in a metallic chassis too, so even though you're spending a lot less on the phone it likely won't feel like you've bought something made out of wet cake.

The same again

The Lenovo K5 seems to be a rebadged version of the Vibe K5 Plus - this makes sense given the UK market doesn't have the raft of smartphone options that Lenovo touts around the globe, so differentiation isn't necessary.


If the specs are the same, it means you'll be getting a huge 2750mAh battery for the price, and the Snapdragon 616 processor (combined with 2GB of RAM) will be able to push things along pretty well in the background - certainly outperforming the price tag.

There's 16GB of internal storage with the option to add more through microSD - it's here that we can see the cost savings though, as the K5 will only support expandable memory up to 32GB.

There will obviously be question marks about this phone - is the camera actually any good? Will the Dolby Atmos speakers offer non-tinny sound? - as the costs have to be reduced somewhere.

The Vibe K5 Plus also only comes with Android Lollipop, but given that phone is tipped to get Marshmallow soon, the Lenovo K5 might well arrive with it in the UK.

The Lenovo K5 release date has been set for early June, with Amazon, Tesco and subsidiaries of Dixons Carphone (so Carphone Warehouse and PC World, presumably) putting it on sale.

The only question now is: what's Lenovo up to? Given the phone will compete at the lower end of the smartphone market with the usually-excellent Moto G - will there be some cannibalisation, or is Lenovo too much of an unknown brand over here to compete?

TOPICS
Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grew with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.

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