The new Lenovo Phab 2 series focuses more on multimedia, releasing three 6.4″ phablet smartphones for the lineup. One smartphone caught the attention of enthusiasts, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro which is the 1st Google Tango enabled smarthpone designed for creators.
But what makes it so special? For starters it’s the only smartphone with Google Tango, which means it can create its own augmented reality world at the size of a smartphone. To be clear, Virtual reality is wearing a special vision to display your world whereas Augmented reality is adapting to your environment, kinda similar to Pokemon Go’s catching method.
There is no hiding it, this phone is big at 6.4 inches. In our experience, its a conversation starter as it’s quite rare to see smartphones today with this size. Not to mention the three camera setup at the back which raises more curiosity.
The Phab 2 Pro is created in a solid metal back with sandblasted finish which gives it a fine and matte-like gradient finish of gray color. It feels nice and premium to hold, though its a bit slippery in the side.
The back of the Phab 2 Pro is curved similar to the ZenFone 2 series, it gives an overall better grip as it molds better to your hands. Fortunately, in our time of using the Phab 2 Pro, there weren’t any major occasions of dropping the phone.
Glass on the front is slightly curved, this allows for a better grip especially for such a large phone. It’s protected by Corning Gorilla Glass, so no worries of everyday bumps and scratches.
At the bottom are two speaker grills with pentalobe screws exposed, but don’t be fooled as only one speaker grill is actually working.
The Snapdragon 652 processor and 4GB RAM is pretty much a future proof combination, especially for the Phab 2 Pro as it specializes in multimedia. Multi-tasking is easy, not much hiccups were encountered in regular apps but more of augmented reality apps.
Now it’s really hard to explain Augmented Reality, but as compared to previous AR efforts in smartphones. The triple camera setup in the Phab 2 Pro enables it to learn the environment around you and adapts to it, making your environment 10ft away an augmented reality playground.
Here is a good example from techradar.com
As you can see, since Google Tango can learn the environment it can detect chairs, tables, height and even ceilings. It creates augmented characters and changes size when getting nearer or farther making your experience real-like.
This is thanks to the laser auto-focus that detects the distance of items, primary camera to see the surroundings, depth of field camera for the object sensing and a fish eye lens camera to overall see the environment 165 degrees.
While the use for AR right now is limited, it’s potential is really big. One thing we noticed is that all apps for Google Tango are really slow in loading, so please have patience when using the apps.
Lenovo even showed us this bluetooth game controler which is a fully interactive for the Phab 2 Pro. Right now it’s designed for FPS gaming which lets you roam around within a 10ft of area and shoot aliens.
Photos produced by the Phab 2 Pro were average, despite having a laser-auto focus it wasn’t able to manage good focusing and photos lack contrast as photos resulted to be dark, soft and gloomy.
Colors are accurate and shooting time is fast, perhaps this can be addressed with a software update.
