Lenovo A7000: First Dolby Atmos Smartphone

Dolby Atmos, a surround-sound technology, is making it into smartphones, and Lenovo is the first OEM in the world to integrate it. Besides this specific feature, the Lenovo A7000 is a 5.5-inch (HD) Android smarpthone with an 8-core SoC (main processor) which should be able to handle multimedia files with ease.

If you are not familiar with Dolby Atmos, it is a pretty amazing surround sound technology that allows various theater speaker configurations to play the surround sound in the way it was intended when the movie was created. This is actually pretty difficult because each theater has different layout and speaker configurations.

To compensate for that, Dolby Atmos relies on processing the sound in the theater in real-time to adapt the audio playback so that the final sound wave that hits the spectators ears are perfect. All of this is normally run by a cabinet-sized computer present in each Atmos-enabled theater.

On a tablet, Atmos is optimized to run with headphones and will virtualize the sound accordingly and provide an excellent surround sound experience — we have heard various demos over the years, and it is excellent, even with plain headphones. It is also possible to connect a tablet to a Atmos home theater box, but in that case, the processing is done in the box, and not on the tablet.

At this point in time, the most difficult part is to find movies that are compatible with Atmos, and while new movies coming out are more likely to fit that category, older releases will probably have to be remastered. At this point, it’s not completely clear where you can find those — we’ll have to ask Dolby, Lenovo and Google.

Design-wise the Lenovo A7000 weighs only 140g, which is not much for a phone with a 5.5” screen. It is 7.9mm thin, and comes in white or black. At this time, the rest of the specifications are still pending, but we should know more during the MWC show as Lenovo will release more details.

Sold for only $169 (no contract), the Lenovo A7000 seems to provide a tremendous value and could be an excellent multimedia 5.5” phone, for the price. Lenovo says that it will be available in March, but the countries list was not available at this moment.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: dolby, Lenovo, Lenovo A7000, MWC, MWC 2015