As Lenovo enters deeper in the Android smartphones market, the company wants to make sure that the out of the box experience is good and that all the needs of its customers are served without requiring much efforts. In some sense, it is not unlike what Apple is doing on the Mac, where most of the basic functions are there (email, text, photo editing, movie editing…), except that these apps are going to be available on Android, iOS, Windows and Windows Phone. At the moment, Lenovo has come up with 5 apps that it deems to be essential:
SHAREit works with any Android phone and lets users exchange large quantities of files directly (peer to peer exchange) without having to use a cloud service or previous mobile data bandwidth. I’ve downloaded it on a non-Lenovo phone that was around and this works pretty well. It’s very easy to select whatever files (app, general file, photos, contacts…) you want to send, and just hit “send”. The other party needs to tap on “receive” and the transfer can start.
SECUREit is mainly aimed at keeping your phone secure and fight spam, data-theft and other viruses. This could be of help if you have a habit of installing applications that are not verified by Google, from a free store or even by sideloading .apk files. There is also a space to hide private contacts, messages and calls.
SYNCit is probably one of the most useful utilities that Lenovo brings to the mobile ecosystem. “I can’t get my contact out of my iPhone” is the #1 reason that I hear as for why people don’t want to switch. Although there are already some apps that do it, I don’t think that any of them covers so many operating systems. for instance, none of the ones I know would help someone switch from iOS to Windows Phone.
SNAPit (see main image) Camera is a Lenovo Camera app that claims to be good at shooting panoramas in low-light and it seems to me that its added-value is that it has a ton of effects that can easily be applied to your photos. Maybe the more interesting feature is the ability to create animated GIF files which you can then upload to social networks. This is a feature that I have not seen in preloaded cameras, so if that’s your thing, you may want to check it out.
SEEit Gallery is designed to ease the management of your photos. It’s clear that some of us have taken a LOT of photos and didn’t take the time to manage them properly. This utility adds facial recognition which is nice when looking for picture of a specific person (I do that with Picassa on the desktop and it works great. SEEit gallery also has some editing functions, but if you want my opinion, I think that Lenovo should add the ability to “select all” photo and delete. A lot of people would actually pay for that on iOS.