Lenovo to ditch Vibe Pure UI on all its future smartphones, starting with the K8 Note

Not many users will remember Lenovo for producing their own kind of UI for their breadth of smartphones, mostly because the Vibe Pure UI that Lenovo had concocted was derivative of many other similarly designed UI, causing it to not make much of an impression as much as the MIUI or TouchWiz could have ever made on users. Lenovo has just decided to change that.

Reports state Lenovo is planning on ditching its Vibe Pure UI skin from all of its smartphones in the future and instead swapping it for the vanilla Android UI experience as the default, which is also what Lenovo-bought Motorola adheres to. The decision does seem sensible as vanilla Android is known for its fluidity and ease of use that does not tamper with the user experience of the smartphone. It is less bloat-heavy and uses simple and minimal system resources to function, maintaining a much faster Android OS.

The company announced this just a few days before the launch of its new K8 Note launch which will be the first in the Lenovo line-up to come with Android Nougat 7.1.1 out of the box with vanilla Android instead of the Vibe Pure UI. Lenovo India’s marketing head’s explanation for foregoing with the Vibe Pure UI is that the company has received requests and has noticed the demand by users who would rather use the stock vanilla Android interface than use the Vibe Pure UI. The company will be making just a few changes to its vanilla Android software to accommodate for Dolby Atmos and TheatreMax technology. Everything else is said to be completely stock Android otherwise. The decision was a result of 11 months of generating user feedback and taking a look at the software perspective of the company’s smartphones.

What has also reinforced the decision to use stock Android is the demographic preferences of the company’s many smartphone users. In China, the stock Android skin is not preferred, while the market in India prefers having bloat-free software. This change will also make it easier for the manufacturer to update the phones as the latest Android updates arrive, hopefully making the wait to the next Android update sooner, rather than later. Lenovo has also announced that all of the launched form the K series onwards this year, will be made update-able to Android O when it releases. The timeline has not been announced, but they have guaranteed the update. The K8 Note will arrive in India on August 9 and will be the first among many new Lenovo phones to feature stock Android.

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