First glimpse of Lenovo Zuk Z1
Lenovo’s ZUK was expected to launch in China in April last year but its first product was launched in August. Gadgets 360 got a chance to spend some time with the new ‘ZUK Lenovo Z1’ ahead of its launch in India.
The Lenovo Z1 smartphone doesn’t look at all like any other recently launched device by Lenovo. Its design is completely new. The smartphone has a 5.5 inch display. The glass on the front makes the frame of the device appear larger. The rear panel of Zuk Z1 is slightly curved which gives good grip of the phone.
The rear panel appears to be made of plastic but it is non-removable. There is no branding of the company on the front but there is Zook logo on the rear. It is worth noting that the Lenovo logo was not present anywhere in the sample unit we received.
The chamfered edges give the handset a nice look and plastic antenna strips can be seen on the top and bottom of the ZUK Z1. The volume and power buttons are on the right side which can be easily used with one hand. The 3.5mm audio jack is at the top while the speaker grill and USB Type-C charging port are at the bottom. Lenovo says that the phone supports 5Gbps USB 3.0 transfer speed, which means data transfer is 10 times faster than USB 2.0.
Overall, the ZUK Z1 has a great design and the phone feels good. At 175 grams, this smartphone can be said to be a little heavier than the OnePlus One (162 grams) with its larger screen size. The ZUK Zend1 measures 155.7×77.3×8.9mm and is comfortable to hold.
The Lenovo Zuk Z1 smartphone has a physical home button just below the screen which also has an integrated fingerprint scanner. The phone can be operated with one hand. We were told that the ZUK Z1 can respond quickly by recognizing fingerprints from any angle. But we could not investigate this in the limited time we got with the device.
The Z1 smartphone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor clocked at 2.5 GHz. There is Adreno 330 for graphics. RAM is 3 GB. Zuk Z1 has 64 GB storage but the storage is not expandable. Another major feature of the Zuk Z1 smartphone is its 4100 mAh battery. The dual SIM smartphone supports Nano SIM and supports 4G in both the SIMs. In India, it supports FDD band 3 (1800 MHz) and TDD band 40 (2300 MHz).
The biggest feature of Lenovo Zuk Z1 is that the phone runs on Android based Cyanogen OS 12.1. This means that users will get many options to customize their phone. With the help of the Theme app, users will also be able to change the wallpaper, font, icon and boot animation. The ZUK Z1 also comes with pre-installed apps like AudioFX which lets you adjust the equalizer settings for your music. Like other Cyanogen 12.1 devices, the ZUK Z1 also comes with Truecaller integration. During the time we spent with the Lenovo Zuk Z1, we did not notice any problems with multitasking and touch.
Talking about the camera, Lenovo Zuk Z1 has a 13 megapixel rear camera with Sony IMX214 sensor. The camera comes with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS). This feature is mostly seen in premium smartphones only. The phone has an 8 megapixel front camera. We found the camera app easy to use. In a limited time, camera testing shop Zoook Z1 took good photos in daylight. Even in low light, the quality of the photos was good and the photos came with good details. But the pictures taken from the front camera can be said to be of average quality only.
We would like to reserve our judgment about the overall performance of the ZUK Z1 for now. We will give our final decision only after a detailed review process.
Lenovo ZUK Z1 was launched in China for 1,799 Chinese Yuan (about Rs 18,250). Therefore we can expect that the phone will be launched in India also at the same price. We will have to wait for the official launch by the company till the second week of May.
As expected, this smartphone will be sold only online. With this price it will be compared with OnePlus 2 and other phones of this price.
