Lenovo Phab 2 Pro Review: The First Tango Augmented Reality Smartphone

No one would argue that all smartphones on the market could benefit from better battery life. It's just the nature of the beast. However, there's always a trade-off between performance, size and power consumption. To discern how the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro compares to other smartphones phones with respect to battery life, we ran it through AnTuTu Tester's Battery test, a benchmark that puts a reasonably heavy load of mixed usage on the devices being tested. 

This test cranks up workloads for the processor, graphics core, and memory, and runs through a number of real-world scripted workloads as well, including web browsing, gaming and video playback. There is also audio played back through the speaker for a few portions of the test.

Battery Life How Long Did They Last?

Considering its large 6.4-inch display that is nearly a full inch diagonal larger than many of the other devices in this test, the Phab 2 Pro actually performs respectably here. It's a middle of the pack performance to be sure, but then again there's a lot of display area to light up in this device. In practice, all but heavy users will have no problem getting though a day of mixed mode usage with the Phab 2 Pro. Its 4050 mAh battery will offer a healthy power backup when idle, if you don't have the display lit up constantly.

Lenovo Phab 2 Pro Final Analysis

Performance-wise in the benchmarks, simply put, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro is uninspiring. There's just no two ways around that. The numbers are the numbers as they say, and this device delivers middling performance in general compute applications, web work, gaming and even with respect to battery life. Conversely, along with its rear three camera vision system and Tango core software engine, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro can, power experiences, features and functions you quite literally can't experience on any other smartphone on the market currently. And for the most part, its AR performance is fluid and smooth, at least within the current crop of Google Tango powered apps on the Play store.

 
The reality (and not augmented) is, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro is not only a niche' device but also ahead of its time. The AR ecosystem is still fledgling in both software and hardware, but we applaud Lenovo for making the bold, dare we say, "courageous" step of introducing such a device to the market in full retail-ready form. Lenovo took Google's existing Project Tango AR technology and built it into a viable handset that is able to deliver the experiences available on the platform as it exists today, and that's an impressive feat of engineering at a base level minimum. 

What's also fairly impressive is the price point Lenovo was able to deliver with Phab 2 Pro. For a device that has not only a complex three camera powered machine vision system strapped to its back, but also a high quality, massive QHD 6.4-inch display and great build quality, dropping in at an MSRP of just $499 carrier unlocked is a fairly impressive achievement.

A true Augmented Reality smartphone still feels like a work in progress but Lenovo, without question, has indeed made progress and moved the platform forward very much the same way its Moto division has with the modular smartphone concept. When it comes to truly innovative efforts like this, we have nothing but applause. 

Big, beautiful display Very high build quality  Innovative Tango AR features and capabilities 64 GB of storage, expandable Great price point for features and capability	Middling battery life Middling performance No dust or water resistance May be too big for some