It’s surprisingly light for what’s on the inside. A 5,100mAh battery that everyone is impressed with. After all, a mere truck of a battery isn’t enough — it should work well and do a good job of charging quickly.

The P2 is meant for those who have to make long calls all day and can’t afford to get frantic because the battery is just about to run out. Or for those who want to lose themselves in gaming, watching movies and keeping themselves entertained without having to stop for a charging intermission.

On this front, the P2 and its battery and the manner in which it’s been made to work, deliver excellently. You would have to be a very unusual user to polish off the battery in one day.

More typically, you can let it see you through two days of use and if you’re a little more moderate, even three.

Granular controls

Not only does the battery last, there’s a lot of granular control you can do for it. You can optimise the battery usage for specific apps and you can use the Power Manager settings to shut down some apps. On top of that, there’s a battery saver mode in case you’ve reached the last lap of its life for the cycle. And when you do finally run out of battery juice, the fast 24W charger in the box knows what to do — give it a big shot of power if it’s very low or let it charge more slowly when it’s reached a certain minimum. Another unique feature is that there’s a hardware button – a little round notch on the left edge – that you can flip to send the phone into power saving mode. Frankly, you can activate that any time you put down the phone and it will become quite a matter of habit.

All the phone syncing will then only happen when you bring it back to normal, but you will get your calls and messages.

Obviously Lenovo was thinking battery right through making every aspect of this smartphone.

Solidly built

For all that battery, the P2 is easy to hold. It’s soft on the edges and a bit slippery for sure but very solidly built. If you really do talk for long or very frequently, it might be a good idea to give it a case that has a textured sweat-friendly grip. It's also not bad looking at all, despite mostly following the current trend in Chinese phone design. The gunmetal grey I saw was rather nice and businesslike.

What the P2 is not surprisingly light on, however, is its price — ₹16,999 for a 3GB RAM version and ₹17,999 for a 4GB RAM variant. I find myself a little conflicted on the price.

There are other phones with huge batteries around and some are cheaper. The P2 doesn’t come with any killer hardware specs either. It doesn’t have a specially good camera despite all the fancy terms. The 13MP and 5MP shooters are about okay.

Killer power saving switch

On the software front too, it’s much on par with competitors in this category.

Where it scores over others is in the superb charging, the actual performance of the battery, and that killer power saving switch.

The P2, like many Lenovo phones now, also supports what the company calls Theatre Max, a way of using a VR headset to convert all sorts of content into theatre mode.

Price: ₹16,999 (3GB RAM) and ₹17,999 (4GB RAM)

Love: Big battery performs well, great fast charging, fantastic power saver switch

Hate: Camera too average, that price needs tweaking

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