The 4000mAh battery phone: Lenovo S860 makes an entrance

Lenovo, the Chinese company that’s acquired Motorola recently, has just unveiled a trio of affordable new Android smartphones at Mobile World Congress 2014, and heading that lineup is the Lenovo S860, a phone with an impressive 4000mAh battery that should last you days, and even allow you to use your phone as a charging station for other devices via a bundled-in microUSB cable.

The huge battery is clearly the biggest selling point of the Lenovo S860: it’s quoted battery life numbers include the impressive 24 hours of 3G talk time and 40 days of standby.

On paper, the Lenovo S860 is a step above average mid-range devices, but still a step down from top-shelf offerings: it features a 5.3-inch 720 x 1280-pixel IPS display, dual front-facing speakers, a quad-core chip and an 8-megapixel rear camera. Made out of a single piece of metal (with a brushed finish on the back), it looks way more durable than common plastic gadgets. It’s 0.4” thick and weighs 0.42lbs, so it’s not among the thinnest and lightest devices out there.

Under the hood, the S860 runs on a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek chip (Lenovo is not saying which one exactly, but judging from the clock speed, this could be the MT6582) with 2GB of RAM.

The S860 ships with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean out of the box, comes with 3G connectivity, and dual SIM connectivity. It also features 16GB of internal storage, but we have no word whether this can be expanded via microSD cards.

Finally, the Lenovo S860 price is set at $349 off contract, decidedly in mid-range territory. It will arrive in select markets, and while it cannot compete with the Nexus 5 (sold for the same price in the United States), chances are that it will arrive in markets where the competition landscape is different.