Every so often, a smartphone comes with a feature that causes me to raise my eyebrows. The Lenovo A7000 is one such smartphone. When Lenovo started bragging about how the A7000 is the first smartphone to utilise Dolby Atmos technology to bring 3D sounds to the smartphone, I was very skeptical about it. Now that I have the A7000 for a week, I can safely say that I was right to be skeptical.

No Frills

I don’t really have any comments to make about the A7000 when it comes to looks. The whole plain black look of the phone isn’t going to win any beauty awards, but it does give it that non-nonsense, “I’m just here to do my job well” kind of feel, and as such, I have no problem with its design.

It’s What’s Inside That Counts

Powering the A7000 is a 1.5GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6752m and 2GB of RAM with the graphics department handled by the Mali-T760MP2. All these components translates into a very smooth performance across the board for the A7000. Throughout my use of the phone, it did not slow down or crash during when I multitask. The camera on the A7000 is decent. The pictures taken with it is pretty good, but it suffers in low light conditions. Battery life is pretty cool as well, with me being able to squeeze out a full work day even with intensive use.

A For Effort

Let’s get down to the feature that Lenovo is yelling from the mountaintops, the Dolby Atmos. I think this doesn’t need to be said, but the A7000 does not boast a proper Dolby Atmos system. The Dolby Atmos system on the A7000 is actually a rather sophisticated equaliser app that tempers around with the sound frequency to achieve that 3D sound effect. It doesn’t really manage to capture that 3D sound effect that Lenovo wants it to, but I can feel that they’ve tried their best to emulate the effect.

Don’t Write It Off

The A7000 is a rather decent phone to own. The performance and longevity of the thing is pretty impressive in my opinion. Sure the Dolby Atmos system is not what Lenovo hyped it up to be, but that doesn’t change the fact that the A7000 is still a great all-rounder. Besides, if you’re not an audio snob like me, who knows… you might be able to enjoy the Dolby Atmos anyway.

Price: RM 699

Dimensions : 152.6 x 76.2 x 8 mm

Weight :  140 g 

CPU :  Mediatek MT6752m 1.5 Octa-core

Graphics : Mali – T760MP2
Memory : 2GB RAM

Display : 5” 1280 x 720 IPS capacitive touchscreen

Camera : 8 MP rear-facing, 5 MP front-facing

Storage : 8GB

Operating System : Android 5.0 Lollipop
Battery : 2900mAh Li-Po 

3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited : 9160

Antutu : 43114 

Value : 8

Performance : 9

Features : 8

Design : 7

Usability : 9 

Verdict : A well rounded phone, even if the hype for its feature is unwarranted

Total : 8.2