Lenovo P2

If there’s been one universal gripe of the smartphone era, it’s complaints about the battery. Charging your device on a daily basis has become the norm, and almost all of us have a portable battery pack sitting around for when we can’t get to a charger in time. That’s where the Lenovo P2 comes in, offering solid specifications and performance, an attractive price, and what Lenovo claims is a whopping three-day battery life.

Price

The Lenovo P2 is currently available exclusively through Three, and you can buy it on Pay As You Go for just £199, which is great value given the phone’s specifications and build quality, which we’ll go into later. You can also grab it on a 24-month contract, starting at £18 per month with no upfront cost.

That puts the P2 in the same price band as the Honor 6X, currently available for £225, and the Moto G4, which you can grab for £159, and we compare the phones’ respective performance in a little more detail below.

Design

For a £200 phone, the Lenovo P2 looks and feels a lot better than you might expect. It has a metal body that leaves it feeling much more expensive than it really is, and the Lenovo branding is kept to a subdued logo on the bottom of the phone’s rear side. The UK is getting a graphite grey model with a black front, though other regions are also getting it in champagne gold. The width of 8.5mm is impressively slight given the supercharged battery they’ve had to squeeze in, while the weight of 177g is typical for a phone with a metal body.

The 5.5in screen feels generous without making the phone uncomfortably large, and there are slim bezels at the side of the display. Otherwise, the front of the phone has a speaker and camera at the top, and a fingerprint sensor button at the bottom, while the rear has the main camera and flash, and that’s about it. Elsewhere there are the usual power and volume buttons, microphone and speakers, 3.5mm headphone port, Dual-SIM and microSD slot and an extra button to switch on a power saving mode – more on that later.

The overall impression is a phone that hides its price point well, and in terms of build it would be hard to argue that you aren’t getting your money’s worth, so we’re pretty impressed.

Performance

The P2’s headline feature is the massive 5100mAh battery, which is among the biggest we’ve seen in a smartphone yet. Lenovo boasts that it can manage a full three days of usage from a single charge, but we were sceptical – until we actually gave it a go. After 72 hours of standard usage (including checking emails, listening to music, Bluetooth, GPS-intensive apps such as Google Maps, and even a one-and-a-half hour video Skype call) the P2 was still ticking along with a few percent left in the tank. Even after just a week of using the phone, it was a huge relief to find ourselves no longer worrying about battery life or planning around the next charge.

It’s equipped with fast charging via Micro-USB with a compatible charger, and you’ll want it – all that extra battery capacity means extra charging time. Still, you can top it up with about 10 percent in 15 minutes, which should be enough to keep it running for eight or nine hours. If you want to keep it running for even longer, a flick of a

small switch on the left side of the case will activate ‘Ultimate Power Saver’, which in essence dumbs your phone down – you’re left with the ability to send and receive calls and texts, and use simple apps such as the clock (for your all-important alarms), calculator and calendar, but that’s it. It also tells you how long your battery will last while you stay in this mode – with 80 percent of battery left, it predicted another 81 hours of charge. It’s worth noting that when we tested the phone’s battery and kept it running for three days that was without using the power saver mode – so in theory you could keep it going for even longer.

Lenovo is actually so confident in the P2’s battery that the phone can even double up as a power bank for your other devices. It comes with an included USB-to-Micro-USB adaptor, so that you can connect your phone directly into another phone, tablet, smartwatch or other gadget and share some of its battery power. In our testing, it didn’t seem to charge other devices especially quickly, but it could be a great save if you find yourself in a pinch, and could save you from lugging a power bank around with you.

Getting beyond the battery, the rest of the P2’s innards are pretty typical for the mid-range market. It’s probably no surprise that it uses a relatively power-friendly 2GHz Snapdragon 625 processor – it’s not going to come top in any performance charts, but it’s plenty for most purposes, and together with the 4GB of RAM it means day-to-day usage feels fast and responsive. You also get Bluetooth 4.1, NFC, 4G and 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi – pretty much what you’d expect from a smartphone these days. As for storage, you get 32GB, but that’s expandable with a microSD card – though that will take one of the two SIM card slots, so if you want to use it as a Dual-SIM phone, you’ll have to make do with the internal storage.

In our benchmark tests, the P2 offers similar performance to the Honor 6X and the Moto G4, two of the other phones we recommend around this price, and does comparatively well on the graphics tests in particular. With roughly equivalent performance and pricing, the Lenovo’s exceptional battery life makes a pretty compelling argument for picking it up.

The two cameras are also pretty typical for a mid-range Android device, with 13Mp for the rear camera and 5Mp for the front. Photos are crisp and bright, and look great on the bright AMOLED display, but don’t expect anything exceptional – not that you should, given the price. There is also a ‘quick snap’ feature that lets you take a photo when the phone is asleep by double-tapping either volume button – great for photographing something in a rush, though don’t expect pixel perfect photos from it.

Software

The P2 comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow preinstalled, but we don’t know if or when it might get an update to the more recent Nougat version. It runs a version of the operating system that’s pretty close to stock, but with a few minor tweaks – mostly to allow you some extra customisation. There are some new power management tools to help keep the battery going for even longer, some minor changes to the app drawer and a few extra settings dotted around here and there. You can also map the Android navigation buttons to the fingerprint sensor (touch for back, press down the button for home, and long press to open your recent tasks), saving you some precious screen real estate.

It’s mostly pretty minimal, so there’s not too much running on top of the base Android OS, which helps keep things fast and battery-friendly. It does come preinstalled with a fair few apps you might not be interested in, like Three inTouch and Lenovo’s SHAREit and SYNCit, along with the likes of Deezer and Amazon, but these are all easy to uninstall, so there’s no need to keep them on the device if you don’t want to.

Verdict

The Lenovo P2 is really being sold on the strength of its battery, and the great news is that it lives up to the company’s hype, offering you days of usage and a power bank in a pinch. Throw in the premium design and build quality, and you have a phone that delivers tremendous value for money. It may not boast flagship performance, but by the time you hit your third day without charging, you’re not likely to care that much. Dominic Preston

The P2’s headline feature is the 5100mAh battery, which is among the biggest we’ve seen in a phone. Lenovo boasts it can manage a full three days