Lenovo Launches Zuk Z1 In India At ₹13,499!!

The market for smartphones priced under Rs15,000 is getting hotter--virtually every day there's a new entrant into the segment.

Lenovo has now launched the first offering from Zuk, a smartphone company if spun off from itself in 2015, in this segment. The first offering is called Zuk Z1 and is priced at Rs13,499.

The company also has made an agreement with Cyanogen to base their products on the company's Cyanogen operating system, a custom-build operating system for Android devices.

Zuk Z1 has a 5.5-inch full-HD display with 3GB of RAM. Under the hood, the company has decided to go with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chip with Adriano 330 GPU. That is an interesting choice given a lot of companies build their mid-range smartphones around Qualcomm's newer Snapdragon 600 series processors.


The phone has a dual-SIM support with 4G connectivity. It also features a huge 4,100 mAh battery. It has a 13 MP camera with a Sony sensor and an Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) support. In the memory front, the company has taken another interesting decision by going with inbuilt 64 GB of storage with no expansion support provided.

Zuk Z1 runs on Cyanogen OS 12.1, which is based on Android Lollipop 5.1.1. While a lot of manufacturers are releasing their mid-range phones with Android Marshmallow 5.0, it can be a risky bet to launch a phone based on Lollipop. Especially when the release of the latest Android N is around the corner.


Lenovo has chosen the path of USB C for the charging and data transfer which seems to be the way forward for a lot of phone makers. Surprisingly it also has USB 3.0 support. The company has taken a decision on placing the fingerprint sensor on the front with the home button.

The Chinese phone makers will face a lot of competition in the coming days. Samsung has just launched two new phones in their J series of phones, namely J5 and J7. Lenovo-owned Motorola is also launching their latest offering Moto G4 in India on May 17. The abundance of choice, a feature of the sub-Rs10,000 market thus far, is beginning to spread to the mid-range market.

Zuk also presented a concept phone which is totally transparent when it is in the standby mode!!!