The phrase “Hongmi Killer” has been thrown around a lot, but we truly believe Lenovo are on to a Winner with the new Lenovo S898T octacore phone.
The Xiaomi Hongmi, later known as the Redmi, is a solid phone with good specs at a great price, but it is beginning to show it’s age and the design was never the most attractive. We have already seen solid rivals from Huawei, Beidou and others, and now it is the turn of Lenovo with a thin, powerful phone costing from just $126.
The Lenovo S898T will come in two versions the 788 Yuan model with 1GB RAM and 8GB memory and a 988 Yuan model with 2GB RAM and 16GB memory. What we like about the S898T is that it’s 5.3-inch OGS display slots nicely between the sizes offered by the Redmi and Redmi Note. The panel on the Lenovo is also a LTPS unit so you can easily use the phone with gloves or even with wet hands.
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Lenovo will only offer the S898T with the 1.4Ghz version of the octacore MT6592 (the same as the entry-level Redmi Note) but with options of up to 2GB RAM, this should provide more than enough performance for most users. The phone also sports a 13 mega-pixel main camera and 5 mega-pixel front.
We don’t know the battery size just yet, but this might be one area the Lenovo S898T falls against the Redmi. The body of the phone measures just 7.9mm so we don’t expect anything as large as a 3200mAh battery on board. The only other issue, if you are not in China, is that the ’T’ in the name stands for TD-SCDMA, so no 3G for international users! Let’s hope a WCDMA model is in the pipes.