Lenovo ZUK Z2 Smartphone Review

[Redaktion]

A lot of smartphone for little money. With the second generation of the Z series, ZUK continues where the Z1 model left off: Very good technical specifications at a low purchase price. The fewest manufacturers manage a Snapdragon 820, 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of ROM for 270 Euros. Find out in our report where Lenovo's subsidiary brand ZUK had to make cutbacks.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ZUK-Z2-Smartphone-Review.170061.0.html

[akala]

Are you guys really can record HD videos at 960 fps? Because I can't find any video about that, only I can find is it can record HD videos max 120 fps, can you share the videos you recorded? Thanks.

[Praetor]

When you say second SIM is only 3G, can the Zuk Z2 phone do simultaneous 4G/3G as other Snapdragon 820s (along with some 617/652 phones can do).

Major operators in Australia and Singapore are shutting down 2G networks in the coming months.

[Akim A Green]

The 64 GB is secondary storage not ROM, which stands for read on lyrics memory.

[xavation]

Dear Notebookcheck, can you please give the 'gps-test' an upgrade? I really like the in-depth review, though the gps section could be better. The accuracy in the current test is definitely falling behind the rest of the quality of the review. If you look at the picture of the garmin; it is going through 3 house blocks:s, yet it is used as a measurement to benchmark the accuracy of the phone's gps.

Therefore I'd like to suggest to use an device with RTK as a reference. Also the logging interval could be set to 1s (or faster, to avoid cutting corners) and maybe it is good to include a comparison with other smartphones, just like you compare other properties of the phones.

I hope you will receive this as positive feedback!

[Vaibhav]

Does this phone really have ois? There is no mention of it on any other site. Please clarify as then I might purchase it.

[shubham]

Does this phone really have ois? There is no mention of it on any other site. Please clarify as then I might purchase it.

No it doesn't have ois,though the Indian version I.e. Zuk z2 plus is going to have electronic image stabilisation

[shubham]

Are you guys really can record HD videos at 960 fps? Because I can't find any video about that, only I can find is it can record HD videos max 120 fps, can you share the videos you recorded? Thanks.

it can record max 120 fps...if you try 960 fps it will slow down the 120 fps video recording

[Skumar]

Hi,
can anyone please let us know whether it support VoLTE in India and thus Jio SIM :D ?

[Jarn]

I'd just like to give my own opinion on this phone as a consumer who actually bought this phone a few months ago.

I'm someone who likes to go for the lesser known brands and like to choose a phone that not everyone has. After my old phone broke and doing research I chose for the Zuk Z2 because it seemed like a lot of phone for the money.

In general I'm happy with the phone but would I buy it again? no
Why not?:

- The phone looks fine to me and the glass back seemed very nice. However, whenever I would put my phone down and the surface wasn't perfectly leveled it would slowly slide off. I'm careful with my phone but if you have no cover it's only a matter of time before it will fall. this brings my to point 2.

- Once the back glas breaks (which it did for me after a few weeks before I managed to find a cover for it) you will have to send it to China to get it repaired.

- Normal shops can't repair the phone as they can't get their hands on the right components.

- The customer service is pretty much nonexistent. You can try and find an e-mail address in English but getting them to respond is very difficult (I've tried many times). 

- You (probably) won't get any software updates. There is a bug in the software which doesn't allow you to access the app permission option. normally this would be solved with an update. An update was promised a long time ago just like they did with the Z1 but I've kinda lost hope on that.

It's not all bad. I've enjoyed using the phone very much. It's fast, the camera is really good (provided there is enough light), and I like the features such as the finger print scanner you wouldn't expect on a phone this price.

It's just the fact that there is pretty much no customer service, no sign of any updates and some things aren't translated and are displayed in Chinese that makes the whole brand and phone feel like a cheap knock-off.

I can't really recommend the phone. 

[Bjarnit]

Do you know if this phone is CE approved?

BR
Bjarni

[AlexC1981]

I purchased this phone for use in the UK and have been delighted so far.  I made sure the seller sent me one with the original Chinese ROM, not a cobbled together international ROM. 

The phone has downloaded over the air updates in England and did not even need to use a China based VPN, it all worked just fine.  I have installed Google Services and Google Play, again all working fine.

The only downside is that the phones only built in languages are US English and some sort of Chinese/Mandarin, which means that Google maps navigation speaks with an American accent rather than a British one.  I can install British text to speech, keyboard and dictionaries, so it really isn't a problem for me as Google maps is the only application I have found to be affected by this.

The Chinese standard ROM does not have an app drawer, which is astonishing, but easily fixed by downloading an app drawer from Google Play.  All your unused icons can be neatly tidied away in a folder on one of the home screens.

The storage appears lightning fast to me, so I would not worry about the benchmarks in this article.  Most phones of this price come with a small internal memory and you have to use an SD card for storage, which would be much slower than the built in memory.

There are loads of types of case available and they are so cheap to order from China that I ordered 3 different types at the same time as I ordered my phone so that they arrived at the same time.

In summary, this phone is a huge leap up in capability from my Galaxy Note II, which really used to struggle with google maps.  No problem at all for the ZUK Z2.  The 5 inch size is smaller than my Note II and in my opinion it is the perfect sweet spot for ease of use.

[Aviv]

I have never seen such a detailed review in my life! ,
Good job

[CGO89]

If somebody is interested, I found Lenovo ZUK Z2 at a flash sale: http://www.gearbest.com/cell-phones/pp_462204.html?wid=4&lkid=10606859

[Vytas]

The phone has downloaded over the air updates in England and did not even need to use a China based VPN, it all worked just fine. 

Dear AlexC1981 could you kindly advice how is possible  to download Android updates for this ZUK Z2 phone ? Manufacturerr planned to release 7.0 Android for ZUK Z2 on 17 May, but as I am in England I'm afraid my ZUK Z2 has no controls for upgrade command.  -Thank you very much.