Let's take a selfie

A NEW SMARTPHONE with sleek looks and a great display, the Lenovo S90 also boasts good performance and a range of useful functions at an affordable price.

Excellent for the selfie obsessed, it comes with an 8-megapixel camera with flash and a BSI (backside-illuminated) image sensor as well as special light filling and beauty modes.

The S90 comes in aluminium uni-body design that is rounded at the edges. It is available in three colour options including Platinum and Champagne Gold. The white front option of the Platinum model is particularly attractive and blends well with the silver aluminium chassis. The phone is about 6.9mm thin.

The smartphone is powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8916 64-bit processor running at 1.2 GHz. It has 2 gigabytes of working memory or RAM and 32 GB of internal storage but no optional microSD card slot. The S90 runs on the Android 4.4 operating system and uses 5-inch Super amoled HD display with 1280x720-pixel resolution.

The S90 supports both HSPA+ 3G connection and LTE 4G connection. I tested it with TrueMove H’s LTE 4G connection and I found that the phone had impressive data speed.

Downloading and installing apps took no time at all, with most completed in less than 30 seconds. 

I used the Ookla Speedtest app to check the data connection speed and found that the S90 could achieve a download speed of 30.22 Megabit per second and an upload speed of 21.48 Mbps. The download and upload speeds also depended on the servers the app selected for use in the speed tests.

The S90 had good performance. Its touch screen and menus were responsive and scrolling was fast. Graphic games, such as Asphalt 8: Airborne by Gameloft, also played smoothly.

The S90 comes with a 13-megapixel main camera that uses OmniVision’s new PureCel image sensor, a BSI sensor, allowing it to capture good-quality photos in most light conditions.

Available modes include Portrait, Landscape, Sunset, Party, Motion, Night Shot and Beach.

The front camera is designed for self-portraits and you can take your selfie several ways in line with your choice of configuration. Simply select one of five choices for firing the trigger – 3-second timer, a tap on the screen, a voice command, by blinking your eyes or by flashing a hand sign.

I tried the voice command with “shoot” and the phone worked efficiently. In then hand-sign choice, you must wave your hand in front of the camera for the shutter to be fired. It takes three seconds once the camera has detected the hand.

When using the selfie mode, you can also activate the flash filling light options of either pink or chrome.

The S90 is preloaded with Lenovo’s new DOit suite of apps, including SHAREit, SYNCit, and SECUREit. The phone’s camera is controlled with SNAPit app and its photo gallery with SEEit app.

To use SYNCit, you need to first register for a free account with Lenovo’s cloud storage server. Then, you can back up your contacts, your SMS and call logs to the cloud storage. You can also manage the backed-up items and restore the lists to your new phone.

Lenovo SECUREit is very useful for protecting your smartphone. It contains a variety of data-protection tools to prevent threats and to keep devices running at optimum performance levels. 

SECUREit protects the phone against viruses, spam and malware. It also has anti-theft and parental control functions that require you to set a password to protect your phone.

The anti-theft function will lock down the phone in case someone tries to change the SIM card, which makes it unusable without a password.

SECUREit contains a privacy guard to protect against unwarranted access to users’ private information. Additionally, it blocks spam text messages and calls, tracks data usage and can even encrypt private calls and contacts.

SHAREit lets you easily share files with friends who have also installed the app. The sharing is done via fast Wi-Fi connection, which is 40x faster than Bluetooth connection.

You can use it to share pictures, videos, music files, documents, contacts and even apps.

And in an ever-competitive mid-range market, it’s also good value. |The Lenovo S90 can be yours for only Bt9,990.

 

 

n Bandwidth: 4G LTE FDD Band 1, |3, 7, 20 (2100MHz/1800MHz/2600 MHz/800MHz), 3G UMTS 900MHz / 2100MHz

n OS: Android 4.4 KitKat

n Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8916 64-bit 1.2GHz Quad Core

n Memory: 2 GB RAM

n Storage: 32 GB internal storage

n Display: 5.0-inch (1280 x 720) |Super AMOLED HD display

n SIM: Dual microSIM slots

n Connectivity: Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, GPS, FM tuner

n Battery: 2,300 mAh Li-polymer

n Dimension: 146 x 71.7 x 6.9mm

n Weight: 129g