Five things I dislike about the Lenovo K3 Note

I was looking for a budget phone in the Rs. 10000 range and the K3 Note had some pretty good reviews. I finally decided to buy it on Flipkart to replace my Nexus 5 which was dying.

Here are 5 things I dislike about it! I will write another review with 5 things I like about it soon.

The Camera:
For a budget phone the camera is worse than I expected. Its specs look decent on paper, but it is pretty much unusable in everything except with good lighting. There is a lag before the shutter goes off. In low light you can forget capturing much even with the flash. The more annoying thing is the shake factor. You have to make sure your hands are absolutely steady and noone moves a millimeter if you want sharp images.

The Lag:
This is quite surprising given terms like 2 GB RAM, octacore processor, 1.7 GHz processor come up in its specifications! The official website boasts these specs and claims, "The 8 ARM Cortex A-53 processors, coupled with the ultra-fast 2GB DDR3 RAM makes sure the phone reacts to every swipe at the speed of light, and shows no hesitation to run the most graphic-intensive 3D games." Of the 2 GB of RAM, more than 1 GB is used by the Operating System. Open facebook, whatsapp, gmail and the usable RAM is less than 400 MB. The lag is terrible and you need to wait a couple of seconds before a touch or swipe registers. A lot of K3 Note users have complained about this. I have never tried to play games as yet, but dare not try! The famed octacore processor struggles to multitask.

The Heat:
This is not a bother to me as I do not make long phonecalls, but the space near the speaker tends to get heated when you are on a long phonecall.

The front glass:
Unfortunately this is not Corning Gorilla Glass. Most budget phones have this. It states that the glass is very hard and scratch resistant, but I am not sure - I have opted to use a tempered glass protector.

Menu buttons not backlit:
The menu buttons (home, back and list) are not backlit. It takes a lot of time to get used to their position and hence I end up struggling in the dark or tap the wrong place and wonder what happened.

Besides the camera and the lag, the other things are manageable for a budget phone. I was expecting an average camera when I purchased this phone. I was not expecting such a lag when I saw the specs. I may end up returning this phone if the lag worsens any more.