It has been 2 months since I bought this phone and I loved the look & feel the phone gives. Fortunately, that is still there! BUT the performance -- it is gone from bad to worse in 2 months. And absolutely worst after I updated it to Lollipop 5.1. My advice, if you buy this phone or already own it, do NOT update it to Lollipop.
Issues:
1) The Contact Manager App: Single app for contacts, dialer and messaging. Size goes up to 400MB with 130 contacts. So, if I close the app and reopen it, it will take more than 5 mins to load the contacts. Similar effort if I close the SMS service. Only solution is, never close the contact manager and sms service. Use Hangouts for faster loading of contacts and sms. Still to make a call, you would need few extra mins - EVERY time you need to make a call.
2) Phone does not have the legendary Lenovo Power Manager App. Only a power manager option which offers quite limited features (10% of the earlier app).
3) On 13th Nov 2015, they released the Lollipop 5.1 update for this phone and I was stupid to upgrade. To my horror, soon the update was completed and I checked the applications, the security app was gone. The performance of the phone went so bad, that it almost hangs every 20-30 mins with hardly any app running. It has been 8 hours since the update was installed, and my contact manager still hasn't loaded the contacts and whatapp all contacts is trying to update the contact list at 8MBPS WiFi with Torrent download speed over 900Kbps. First I thought, my contacts are gone, but they are there as I can see in the Hangouts contacts.
I sure would not recommend this phone to anyone even for free!!!
Prior to this device, I used Lenovo S860; that device literally made me a fan of Lenovo's custom KitKat version. P70-A is lighter (Lighter even for 147 gm). HD wallpapers and texture makes the device looks a real beauty. Battery life is somehow longer than S860 (Both have same battery). Lenovo has included a back cover to this device (additional cover), which is also quite cool.
Drawbacks for this device are:
If you are accustomed to Lenovo KitKat customizations for app manager like the app privacy settings, ability to enable/disable multiple apps, killing the background apps with single click using app manager - all missing. The device features integrated Power Manager with VERY limited features. It is missing the freezing app option of Power Manager so you cannot control what apps can operate with/without your permission.
So, overall - better performance in terms of look & feel than other Lenovo smartphones with almost identical features. But lacks what made me fall in love with Lenovo as brand.
- Paarth Pandya18 Sep, 2015