On the 12th of November, just barely one week ago, I dropped my Lenovo P-70A which has been with me for over 2 years, down the kitchen counter when my hands slipped. It was a good phone. I bought it somewhen in July 2015 when my man was with me (although he wasn’t my man yet at that time) for around RM700.
The main
reason I bought that phone was for its battery capacity. At around 4000mAh and
me actively playing mobile games and downloading an average of one new app
every two or three days, using it for several hours at any given point, the
battery dealt with the power demands quite well. You can read up on other of
its specs here on this
link.
Things I loved About This Phone Model
- That green security icon thing that gives you a very, very efficient clear-your-apps function that you can’t get from any other apps
- Optional app clearing that lets you lock down some apps while clearing all the others
- Dual SIM cards & still a space for an external memory card although you don’t really need that with the 16 GB internal storage.
2GB RAM wasn’t
too bad either; I just needed to keep the habits of clearing my apps off before
playing a RAM-consuming one. The controls were simple, efficient, and if
anything, there were only a couple of things that I didn’t really like.
Things That Could Be Improved
- The brightness goes all the way to the highest settings when you enter the gallery, regardless of your settings. Imagine opening up your photo gallery at night and getting blinded. Mhmm.
- You can’t adjust the brightness settings in the notification bar area when you are using your phone in horizontal mode, so if you have entered a video full-screen mode and it’s too dark, you need to exit the full-screen mode, adjust the brightness, then go back to full-screen again.
- No matter how high-resolution your photos are, the moment you set it to your desktop/lockscreen wallpaper, it will get blurry in a pixel-ish way.
- It can overheat quite a bit sometimes.
- The camera is just okay-ish.
If there’s
one piece of advice I can offer to this phone’s users: Do NOT upgrade your OS
to Lollipop 5.1 if you are using KitKat. I was a fool and I upgraded my phone
to that version for a couple of weeks, and it resulted in such a downgrade of
everything:
Why I'm So Against The Phone OS Upgrade
- The battery consumption rate was so high even at low usage that I needed to charge it up to 3 times a day.
- The app-clearing function was pretty much gone, replaced by an incompetent piece-of-shit button.
- I can have only Messenger, Facebook & WhatsApp running (with background apps cleared up to 5 times just in case), and the phone would still lag so hard that if a call comes in, I can’t press anything on the screen. The incoming-calls screen wouldn’t even show up.
- I can’t stress enough about the lag. If there were incoming video calls, I need to wait for up to 5 seconds after tapping the ‘answer’ button before that click actually registers.
- The photo quality became a pile of shit too. Good luck taking photos with actual faces that aren’t smoothened out & blurred so much that you might as well pretend you actually did a bad Photoshop job with a good photo.
- The screen gestures option was no longer available. My phone’s power button has become a bit hard to press after some time using it, so it can be slightly difficult to unlock it at times. Screen gestures enabled me to just tap the screen a few times to activate it, but this feature was gone too.
- If there was overheat at the previous OS, this version made it worse and more often.
I referred
to this
link here to downgrade my phone back to KitKat one day at work, and
thankfully it worked. *Disclaimer: If you were to try follow the instructions
on this link and something fucks up, neither I nor the writer of that blog
holds any responsibilities for it.
- Well, barely a week later this phone still fell face-first onto the floor and the screen cracked anyways. I took off the tempered glass screen protector a while back since that too was already full of cracks and never got a replacement. After many lucky falls, this one did the job.
- The bottom half of the screen was not responsive at all, which means that I could turn on the phone screen but not enter my passcode.
- I could long-press the power button to attempt to switch it off since I can no longer turn off the morning alarms, but I can’t press the ‘confirm’ button when the phone asks me, “Confirm switch off?”
That very
night around 8p.m. I went out to get myself a new phone, Huawei Honor 6A Pro
for RM699. I’ll be writing a review on this phone real soon, so do look forward
to it! The next day at lunch time, I sent this Lenovo phone for a screen
replacement. I got it for RM250 at One
Specialist Mobile in Sunway Pyramid. The person who served me was this guy
named Steven. Got it back that same evening after work around 6p.m. There’s a
one-month insurance for that LCD screen, so there’s that.
One funny
notable thing was that he asked for my passcode, claiming that he needs it to
know if the phone screen has been implemented correctly. Umm… No sir, you do
not need the passcode to fix an LCD screen. I told him that he could press
around the screen and try keying in any random passcode combinations to know if
it’s working. Later I further told him that I will check the phone myself when
I get it back before I pay him the money. That phone is now back and alive,
working well.
I’m letting
my man use it for as long as he needs to tomorrow. Guess why? He smashed his
phone screen too. Coincidences, coincidence. At least he’ll have no
trouble adapting to that phone I guess, since we used the same phone model.
