14 DAY TRIAL // Chinese company Lenovo recently purchase Google's Motorola Mobility division in order to boost its presence on the North American market, as well as in some emerging markets.
However, this might not be Lenovo's whole plan. Even though the company said it won't interfere with Motorola's current roadmap for the current year, we will never know if that will really happen as we're not truly aware of Motorola's plans for the next few months.
Anyway, while Motorola continues to do business as usual selling its two most popular Moto X and Moto G smartphones, Lenovo announced a new range of mid-end Android smartphones.
Lenovo S660, S850 and S860 have been unveiled earlier this week at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2014 trade fair and we had the chance to give them a try while visiting the company's booth.
We've already reported on the less-featured S660, so now let's see what Lenovo S860 can to, the most advanced handsets of the three the Chinese company introduced at MWC 2014.
First of all, the S860 is a large device heavier than we had anticipated. At only 149.5 x 77 x 10.3 mm, Lenovo S860 weighs 190g (battery included), which makes it one of the heavier smartphones with a larger than 5-inch display.
This is exactly the type of screen one would embed into a mid-end device, so expect average quality when it comes to colors, contrast and other related capabilities.
The bad news is Lenovo S860 is powered by Android 4.2 Jelly Bean operating system out of the box, which makes it an obsolete device even if it has yet to go on sale.
The smartphone performs quite decently when playing videos and browsing the internet, but that's probably due to its 2GB of RAM included. Aside from that the S860 packs a Mediatek MT6582 chipset inside that accommodates a quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz.
The overall aspect of the Lenovo S860 is totally unimpressive. While the smartphone gives the feeling of sturdiness, it feels cheap in hand, thus making it unappealing.
The only thing we found to be above average was listed on paper right beside the testing unit that we handled, and that's the 4,000 mAh Li-Polymer battery Lenovo claims it powers its smartphone.
