Lephone W11 is an Affordable 4G Smartphone for Masses [Review]

Zong 4G is collaborating with the handset manufacturing brand, LePhone, to bring affordable 4G smartphones to the Pakistani market.

Zong plans to introduce three new 4G smartphones of the brand and we are going to look closely at one of the launched devices, called LePhone W11.

These devices are meant to be affordable and not win any spec wars but to provide a normal smartphone experience with entry-level specs and price all the while having 4G support.

Today we have with us the Lephone W11, the most premium one of the bunch. Let’s take a look at it and see how it is.

Unboxing

Design and Build Quality

The W11 is made of plastic and there’s no going around the fact it is an average built phone but for the price, it is fairly decent. Though more and more phones are adopting metal bodies, having a plastic build isn’t exactly bad and it doesn’t actually feel too bad when holding in the hand.

Up front you have the 5.0-inch display. On top of the display you have the earpiece, front camera and the usual sensors. At the bottom of the display are the 3 capacitive recent, home and back key.

Moving on to the back of the phone you will find the primary camera, an LED flash and the finger print scanner. Yes, it comes with a finger-print scanner as well, something you wouldn’t expect in the price range.

At the bottom of the panel you get some Zong branding. The back is removable and so is the battery, allowing you to swap it out and replace it with another one.

At the bottom of the phone you get the microUSB port for charging and data syncing, and the loudspeaker and microphone combo. Lastly, on top of the device there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Overall, the build quality is not bad for the price.

Display

The Lephone W11 boasts a 5.0-inch IPS LCD display coming in at a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels. Right off the bat, it is definitely not the highest resolution screen around but at such an entry-level price there’s not a whole lot of options in the market that even offers this resolution screen.

Coming back to the display of the W11, it’s actually an IPS panel, which means that you generally get some good viewing angles.

Brightness also gets very decently high although you might want to avoid using it in direct sunlight as the visibility isn’t so great. Moreover the W11 is having just a 720p panel, but it’s a 5.0-inch display so text is still sharp and clearly visible and you can’t really make out individual pixels on the screen.

Moreover, I usually lack the eye to notice such things on most phones but what stood clearly in front of me is that the display on the W11 is unusually warm in color. I checked whether some kind of blue light filter was on, but there wasn’t any.

There’s no option in the settings too to adjust it. Whether it was a problem with my particular review unit or just in general, I don’t know but it is something worth mentioning.

Performance & Software

Firstly, let’s get the number out of the way. The W11 uses a Spreadtrum SC9832A processor along with a Mali-400. All of this is backed up by a 1GB of RAM. The processor is 32-bit and is having 4 cores that are clocked at 1.3GHz.

Starting off with the benchmarks, it shows average results with the AnTuTu score coming in at the early 20,000s and similar is the case with Geekbench 4. You can view the becnhmarks for yourself down below.

In real life usage things were fairly reasonable. Moving through the UI was not laggy although not very fast. When exiting an application with multiple applications “open” in the background, the default launcher usually takes about 2 seconds or so before loading and showing the home screen. A tip is to keep your most used applications such as Phone or Messenger so they don’t get cleared from the RAM every time.

For daily usage however, with the RAM regularly cleared, there were no severe issues and the W11 deals with internet browsing and general media consumption a relatively hiccup-free experience.

On the software side of things it is running Android, 6.0 Marshmallow with a customized skin on top and bloated apps such as 360 Security and RAM cleaners are on board which consume RAM.

 

Cameras

The cameras on the W11 consist of a 8MP primary camera and a 2MP front facing secondary camera.

The interface is very simple and straightforward with a huge round shutter button on the bottom of the screen and you can change the modes between Video, Photo and Beauty by swiping either left or right on the screen. LED flash controls, video quality etc are on the top.

Camera results are as you would expect from a 8MP sensor. It takes only decent and usable shots in daylight or in a well-lit area. In fact, the shots I took in a well-lit area were more than impressive than I initially thought they would be.

Macro shots were also no issues for the W11. The area where the W11 lacks is in the sharpness and accuracy of colors in low light.

The front camera is a 2MP sensor. There’s not much to say here besides that it does not do a good job of taking selfies. Obviously, a 2MP is not exactly the ideal setup for taking impressive photos.

You still get okay shots if you take them in direct sunlight. Anything other than sunlight, even artificial lighting, can make the results very disappointing.

Fingerprint scanner

The W11 also has a fingerprint scanner which sets it apart from some of the other offering at this price range. The scanner itself is not bad. Setting up the finger print recognition was easy as always and I was quickly done with the setup process.

Using the fingerprint scanner, I noticed that it actually recognizes the finger print instantly, since it provides haptic feedback but actually unlocking the phone and taking me to the homescreen took a second or so due to the animations.

Again, the functionality of the fingerprint scanner has been compromised because of lackluster software.

Battery

The 2,000mAh battery on the W11 may sound small but paired with a low-end CPU and a low-res screen, it should deliver some decent back-up time. And that’s what the W11 did.

Its a decent battery for light users and would be lasting for a dozen hours without any glitch.

 

Connectivity

The Lephone W11 features dual SIM slots as well as a dedicated memory card slots. Both the SIM slots are capable of running Zong’s fast 4G LTE services.

With just 16GB of internal storage, you might also want to install a microSD card which can be done while using dual SIMs at once too.

Price

Zong has not made this phone available publicly as of yet. We also don’t have a confirmed date for its launch and the final price.

But we can tell you that this phone is going to be priced below Rs. 12,000.

Verdict

If you are out in the market looking for a phone with 4G in the sub-12,000 price range, the Lephone W11 should definitely be considered.

But the thing is that the W11 is not out to win the specs war but it is here to give a decent performance while also allowing you to use 4G networks.

We think its the best 4G phone available in the price and should be a must buy if you can’t afford a high-end device.


    • It should be in R 8000 to 9000 only with SPD Board is not a worthy Hardware

  • Motorola Droid Turbo 1 best option hia and 10 say 11 may aram say mil jaey ga with huge battery and 4G Lte and 3 gb ram
    and Motorola Droid Turbo 2
    14 k may aram say mil jaey ga

  • price should be 7000 or give it for 5000 and make contract with the customer for using zong sim for atleast 6 months.

  • Motorola k second hand sets better hain, buy a good second hand flagship of previous gen from market like LG G series etc instead of wasting money on this. I think


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