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Lenovo Phab 2 Pro : The power of Augmented Reality – Hungry Geeks

Franklin Garcia

Meet the Lenovo Phab 2 Series Left to right : Phab 2, Phab 2 Plus, Phab 2 Pro

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.

Lenovo Phab 2 Pro Specifications

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.

Performance – Phablet Worthy

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.

Augmented Reality Experience

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.

Camera

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.

Battery – Great Stamina with quick charge

What we love about the Phab 2 Pro is it’s whole day battery life, we were able to stay up to 20% at night and charge our phone before sleeping. That’s 4G LTE, Social Media, notifications, messaging and some AR gaming on the side.

But for a 4050mAh battery, we love that it has Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 so it full charges in 1 hour and 15 mins. This is compared to the 2.4A charging that takes 2 hours and 15 mins to charge.

Multimedia Features

Since the Phab 2 Pro is about multimedia, here are worthy mentions about the phone.

The 2k resolution on a 6.4″ screen in great, colors are vivid but lacks a bit of brightness to our taste. Nevertheless, the Phab 2 Pro is great for watching movies especially when using earphones.

The Dolby Atmos software included does improves the audio by adding warmth, bass and improving the range. You can actually hear more sound detail if you turned on the Dolby Atmos software.

Speakers on the Phab 2 Pro is a bit of a letdown, only one is working in the two speaker grills so the sound is only good for 1 person.

Conclusion

Even without the Google Tango in the picture, the Phab 2 Pro priced at Php24,990 has a lot of good features to keep the price tag. It’s snappy Snapdragon 652 processor, 4GB of RAM, 2k resolution screen and 6.4″ footprint makes it a great tablet.

But with adding Google Tango, it created a new opportunity of possibilities for people who are exploratory. While augmented reality is still young, we hope to see it kick off this 2017 as more will join the bandwagon. But right now it’s quite limited, its only for people with access to better internet (Internet consumption is big) and accessible to big spaces (spacious room to play with).

The interaction of AR is good that is made us feel it was actually there, perhaps the improvement that Google can do it to make the apps lighter to load and possibly a local version like local celebrities to appear in some apps to add a touch of localization.

The Good

The Bad

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