Lenovo Vibe K5 review: Base line

Gallery

The Vibe K5 uses a non-customized AOSP gallery. You're greeted with a grid view of your albums, and you can easily create a new one. Inside the album the images are displayed two-a-row, and no pinch gesture is going to change that.

Gallery

The editor, on the other hand, is a bit more powerful. It offers the obvious cropping, rotation and mirroring, color filters and picture frames, but also more serious editing like curves adjustment.

Viewing an image • Detailed properties • Editing an image

There's no dedicated video player, the task is handled from within the gallery. There's little in the way of features other than looping the video.

Playing a video

Music player

The music player is a similarly barebone app. It has the usual tabs for artists, songs and playlists and can pull album art and subtitles off the internet.

Music player

The Vibe K5 comes with Dolby Atmos certified audio enhancements. They're accessed from the settings menu where the Dolby Atmos screen holds the equalizer and other settings. You can change different modes (Movie, Music, Game, Voice, Custom), each getting its own 5-band equalizer setting. Additionally, you have things like surround virtualizer, dialogue enhancer and volume leveler.

Dolby Atmos

FM radio

The Vibe K5 comes with an FM radio receiver. It lacks RDS so you'll need to enter station names manually. You can assign favorites and record off the radio, and you can play through the loudspeaker, but you need to have the headset plugged in so serve as the antenna.

FM Radio lacks RDS

Audio is a little quiet, nicely clean

The Lenovo Vibe K5 isn’t the loudest smartphone we’ve subjected to our audio quality test, but it sounds as clear as most phones when used with an active external amplifier. And the below average volume certainly isn’t too hard to swallow given the low price tag.

The headphones test went very well too - there was a pronounced stereo crosstalk hike, but the other readings remained unchanged so, once again, it performs better than we expected.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Lenovo Vibe K5	+0.02, -0.08	-90.0	91.3	0.0024	0.085	-91.5
Lenovo Vibe K5 (headphones)	+0.02, -0.10	-90.0	90.9	0.023	0.062	-52.5
Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus	+0.02, -0.08	-93.8	92.8	0.0037	0.034	-91.3
Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus (headphones)	+0.09, -0.03	-93.5	92.6	0.070	0.075	-49.0
Huawei Honor 7 Lite (5c)	+0.03, -0.44	-90.4	90.9	0.0019	0.011	-87.9
Huawei Honor 7 Lite (5c) (headphones)	+0.04, -0.47	-90.3	90.7	0.0067	0.072	-73.1
Huawei Honor 5X	+0.02, -0.08	-93.4	90.1	0.0028	0.012	-93.4
Huawei Honor 5X (headphones)	+0.10, -0.03	-92.9	89.8	0.0048	0.071	-78.2
Samsung Galaxy J3 (2016)	+0.04, -0.24	-92.4	92.5	0.024	0.023	-91.3
Samsung Galaxy J3 (2016) (headphones)	+0.37, -0.04	-88.5	90.6	0.045	0.226	-56.9
Sony Xperia E5	+0.14, -0.81	-92.3	92.4	0.0072	0.0093	-91.9
Sony Xperia E5 (headphones)	+0.15, -0.88	-89.5	88.9	0.0090	0.370	-50.7
Motorola Moto G4	+0.02, -0.07	-92.4	92.5	0.0028	0.0084	-92.1
Motorola Moto G4 (headphones)	+0.04, -0.08	-92.0	92.0	0.0073	0.070	-63.8
Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus	+0.02, -0.08	-93.8	92.8	0.0037	0.034	-91.3
Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus (headphones)	+0.09, -0.03	-93.5	92.6	0.070	0.075	-49.0
Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)	+0.02, -0.07	-94.3	92.2	0.0065	0.010	-95.0
Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016) (headphones)	+0.42, -0.01	-93.4	87.1	0.029	0.254	-53.0

Lenovo Vibe K5 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.