Lenovo A6010 will replace the largest selling phone of this year — A6000 Plus — as the primary entry-level offering from the Chinese company in the coming week, making for a small improvement in specifications.
For the A6010, Lenovo seems to have decided not to change anything radically, and are perhaps very pleased with the success of the A6000 — which has sold lakhs, if not millions of units in India over the past few months.
UPDATE: eBay India is selling the phone as Lenovo A6000 Shot, and has priced at Rs 9,500 in India. We expect the A6000 Shot, if that is what the phone ends up being called, see a price decline of around Rs 1,000 at least over the next one month.
Besides being the largest selling smartphone in India in 2015, the A6000 Plus can also claim to have given an impetus to the 4G revolution in this country.
It is estimated that more A6000 (and its Plus version) have sold in India than all other 4G phones combined.
The company has, therefore, kept the phone largely unchanged except for upgrading the operating system to Android 5 and increasing camera resolution. The only major difference in appearance is that the ‘bent arrow’ back-button has been replaced by a triangular button on the front.
While the A6000 came with a 8 MP camera at the back supported by a 2 MP camera on the front, the A6010 will come with a 5 MP shooter at the front and a 13 MP camera at the back.
The cameras are the only change in hardware introduced by the company when designing the successor. Sound has moved up from Dolby Digital Plus to Dolby Atmos.
Other specifications (which remain the same) include 16 GB of memory, Snapdragon 410 chipset and Adreno 306 graphics processor. Battery also remains at 2.3 Ah. Display remain a five-inch, 720p affair.
The most important factor behind the success of the model — its price — to is likely to remain unchanged at Rs 7,499. However, from market buzz, it looks like the phone will no longer be a Flipkart exclusive, which raises a concern that the price could be increased slightly.
Making a phone available only through online channels helps keep its price low. When phones are made available through regular distributors, its price goes up due to distributor and retailer margins.
However, it is not clear whether the phone will be made available through Flipkart’s online rivals like Amazon or through normal shops also. It is also possible that the A6000 Plus could get a price cut with the arrival of its successor.