Difference Between Lenovo K800 and Samsung Galaxy S II

Sometimes you can simulate certain things; in fact, you can simulate a lot of things and get to know how they behave. If the control conditions are justifiable and correct, the outcome is more or less reliable. But there are certain instances when simulation is just not enough. Instead, you have to implement it and verify the design. A lot of vendors have been experimenting with what we are going to talk about today and Lenovo has come out victorious in integrating it to their product. We will have to see whether their decision to integrate this certain piece was a timely and correct decision. The piece we are referring to is the heart of any device, the processor. Lenovo has released the first smartphone featuring an Intel processor, the K800. We are yet to understand the power of a mobile device based on Intel’s Medfield processor, and I’m sure we are going to find many of these in time to come. Intel is by far the most favored processor manufacturer for desktops and laptops, but for mobile devices, we have our share of doubts. The processor is high-end for sure, but the power consumption would be something to inquire about. In any case, we will review it in the due course of comparing K800.

The rival today is one of the benchmarking smartphones in the market today. It comes from the largest smartphone vendor in United States according to 2011 sale records. The Samsung Galaxy S II has brought fame to the Galaxy family in many ways, and it continues to do so being one of the favorite smartphone in the world. Released in April 2011, surprisingly, it can still compete with most of the smartphones released today. That is why we chose it as the perfect opponent for our comparison with Lenovo K800.

Lenovo K800

As we’ve been saying, this is the first Android Smartphone with an Intel processor. K800 is powered by 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2460 single core processor and PowerVR SGX540 GPU along with 1GB of RAM. It runs on Android OS v2.3.7 Gingerbread, but we expect an upgrade to v4.0 IceCreamSandwich soon enough. As far as we could lay our hands, it worked smooth and nice. It has the Lenovo’s Clover user interface which is both good and bad and, in a personal note, I don’t really prefer it. We reckon the user experience on K800 would have been so much better, if the Android stock UI has been left without modifying to suit their needs, because the Clover UI seems to slow down the system to a certain extent. K800 comes in Black and looks decent, but the outlook gives out the feeling that it’s all plastic. It is also somewhat heavy although we don’t have the exact dimensions available. It felt pretty good in the hand, so we reckon you can forget the fact that it’s a bit heavy.

Lenovo K800 features 1280 x 720 pixels resolution at 326ppi pixel density on 4.5 inches LCD capacitive touchscreen. The color reproduction was amazing, and the image and texts looked sharp and crisp, as well. It has 8MP camera with autofocus and dual LED flash, and we assume it would provide the capability to capture at least 720p HD videos because we didn’t get the exact details. Geo tagging is also enabled with the support of assisted GPS. Lenovo hasn’t forgotten to put a front facing camera for the use of video conferences along with Bluetooth v2.1 and A2DP. It has the ability to expand the storage using microSD card, but we don’t know details about the internal storage the handsets are been offered. The network connectivity primarily features HSDPA, and Lenovo K800 also has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n for continuous connectivity and having the ability to act as a hotspot, you can easily share your internet with up to 8 people. We are eagerly waiting to test this handset, and it’s difficult to give out a clear overview without having the information on battery life, but let’s hope we get the updates soon.

Samsung Galaxy S2 (Galaxy S II)

Samsung is the leading smartphone vendor in the US, and they have actually gained much of their popularity though Galaxy family. It’s not just because Samsung Galaxy is superior in quality and uses cutting edge technology, but it’s because Samsung is also concerned about the usability aspect of the smartphone and make sure that has the due attention. Galaxy S II comes in either Black or White or Pink and has three buttons at the bottom. It also has the same curved smooth edges Samsung gives to Galaxy family with an expensive looking plastic cover. It is really light weighing 116g and ultra-thin too having a thickness of 8.5mm.

The renowned phone came with a 1.2GHz ARM Cortex A9 dual core processor on top of Samsung Exynos chipset with Mali-400MP GPU. It also had 1GB of RAM. This was top notch configuration back in April, and even now only a few smartphones surpass the configurations. The operating system is Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread, and luckily Samsung promises an upgrade to V4.0 IceCreamSandwich soon. Galaxy S II has two storage options, 16 / 32 GB. It comes with 4.3 inches Super AMOLED Plus Capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels and a pixel density of 217ppi. While the panel is of superior quality, the pixel density could have been somewhat advanced, and it could have featured a better resolution. But nonetheless, this panel reproduces images in a great manner that would catch your eye. It has HSDPA connectivity, which is both fast and steady, along with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and it can also act as a Wi-Fi hotspot which is really attractive. With the DLNA functionality, you can stream rich media directly to your TV wirelessly.

Samsung Galaxy S II comes with 8MP camera with autofocus and LED flash and some advanced functionalities. It can record 1080p HD videos at 30 frames per second and has Geo-tagging with the support of A-GPS. For the purpose of video conferences, it also features a 2MP camera on the front bundled with Bluetooth v3.0. Besides the normal sensor, Galaxy S II comes with a gyro sensor and the generic android applications. It features Samsung TouchWiz UI v4.0 which gives a good user experience. It comes with 1650mAh battery and Samsung promises a talk time of 18 hours in 2G networks, which is simply amazing.

Conclusion

We are going to give a conclusion on two handsets that are entirely different in architecture, but not so different in the usage. At a glance, you may tend to think Lenovo K800 is obviously the better phone because it has slightly better processor and display panel, but the truth is, we can’t really tell, at least not right now without the ability to perform any benchmark tests on Lenovo K800. Thus, our conclusion will be based on our deductions on the performance Lenovo K800 promises with the given hardware specs. We reckon K800 would perform parallel or below to Samsung Galaxy S II because it is only a single core processor, and we have to consider the maturity aspect, as well. Regardless of that, it would give a smooth user experience, but the heavily modified Clover UI might degrade it to some extent. We appraise the display panel and the resolution highly, and it certainly has a great pixel density to keep the texts and images crisp into the finest detail. That been said, Samsung Galaxy S II does great on all those mentioned characteristics and even though the resolution is less, the display panel is of superior quality. We also have to raise another point. Nowadays, the applications normally come optimized for multi core processors, thus would there be a use of a smartphone with a single core? This is a question you should be asking yourself. We have one final remark about Lenovo K800, and that is about the battery life. While Intel processors are great, they consume a lot of power, and we are certainly hoping that Intel has compensated that with their Medfield processor, and given that Lenovo K800 would be a great smartphone for you to have and we can affirm the same for Samsung Galaxy S II, as well.