Lenovo Phab 2 Pro review: Stumbling out of the gate

I just spent 15 minutes wandering around the office, trying to shoot ghouls in the face with lightning. Before that, I dropped a virtual rococo sofa into the empty space next to my desk, just to see if it would fit. And before that, I measured ... well, everything. Welcome to the augmented life, courtesy of Google and Lenovo. Google has spent more than two years taking its "Tango" technology from project to full-blown product. The goal: to help our gadgets examine the world around them and overlay information -- or even whole new worlds -- on top of the reality we already know. Along the way, Google tapped Lenovo to help craft the first consumer-ready Tango device: an enormous slab of a phone called the Phab 2 Pro. And now it's here.

If the Tango stuff alone didn't make the Phab 2 Pro a groundbreaking device, this is also the first Lenovo-branded smartphone to land in the United States. Too bad it's not quite ready for prime time.

Hardware

I can't emphasize this enough: The Phab 2 Pro ($500) is enormous. Then again, how could it be anything but? We have plenty of things to thank for that, from the phone's 6.4-inch IPS LCD screen to the bank of capacitive buttons below it, to the massive 4,050mAh battery under the hood. Of course, the real reason the Phab 2 Pro is so big is because of all the Tango tech Google helped squeeze inside. It's worth remembering that Google's Tango reference device for developers was a tablet with a 7-inch screen, one of NVIDIA's Tegra K1 chipsets and two -- two! -- batteries.

That Google and Lenovo managed to squeeze all the requisite bits into a mostly pocketable smartphone is a feat in itself. There are, after all, plenty of nonstandard parts here. Just look at the Phab 2's back if you don't believe me. Nestled between the 16-megapixel camera and the fingerprint sensor are two more cameras -- one has an infrared emitter to determine how far things are from the phone, and the other is a wide-angle camera with a fisheye lens that works as part of Tango's motion-tracking system. Turns out, Lenovo had to punch a hole in the phone's main circuit board to make room for all those sensors.

Those cameras and sensors work in tandem with a customized version of Qualcomm's octa-core Snapdragon 652 processor. We've seen more conventional versions of this midrange chip pop up in devices like ASUS's new ZenFone, but the version we have here has been tuned to more accurately timestamp the data captured by all of the phone's sensors. Why? To keep the phone's location in lockstep with all the crazy AR stuff you'll see on screen. Also onboard are 4GB of RAM, an Adreno 510 GPU, 64GB of storage, a micro-USB port and a tray that takes either two SIM cards or a SIM card and a microSD card as big as 128GB.

1 / 25

So, long story short, the Phab 2 Pro is massive, and for good reason. The last time I played with a non-Phab phone this big was three years ago, when Sony launched a version of its Xperia Z Ultra running a clean version of Android in the Google Play Store. Since then, the market has coalesced around big smartphones with screens of about 5.5 inches. Years of similar-size devices, then, means the Phab 2 Pro feels extra unwieldy.

It would've been more of a problem if Lenovo hadn't done such a good job putting the Phab 2 Pro together; the body is carved out of a single block of aluminum, and the screen is covered by a sheet of Gorilla Glass that's ever-so-slightly curved around the edges for that subtle "2.5D" effect everyone seems to love. The aesthetic is pleasant enough if you're into minimalist design, and big-phone fans are probably going to drool, too. If you're thinking of getting one, though, best if you can get some hands-on time before taking the plunge.

Display and sound

The 6.4-inch screen on the Phab 2 Pro is indeed massive, but mostly unremarkable. Lenovo went with an "assertive" IPS LCD screen, which basically means the panel can optimize colors and contrast on the pixel level. It's a handy trick for when you're traipsing around outdoors -- it's excellent under direct sunlight -- but the screen is otherwise forgettable.

Don't get me wrong: Its 2,560 x 1,440 resolution means it's still plenty crisp, even if it isn't as pixel-dense as other devices because of how big the panel is. Color reproduction is accurate too, though it'll definitely feel a little flat if you're coming from a device with an AMOLED screen like the Galaxy S7. What's more, brightness is respectable -- this screen is just a touch dimmer than the iPhone 7 Plus' -- and viewing angles are also pretty great. I half-expected the screen to be worse, because it would have been a likely place for Lenovo to cut corners on a $500 phone.

The sound quality lags behind screen quality, but that's no surprise. The Phab 2 Pro has a single speaker carved into its bottom edge, which makes for anemic, muddy-sounding music, with bass notes utterly lacking in oomph. It's fine for sound effects in Tango-enabled games, but headphones are otherwise a must. It helps that the Phab 2 Pro ships with a Dolby Atmos app that launches automatically when headphones are plugged in. Included are presets for music, movies, games and voices (say, for podcasts), and, in general, they added a decent amount of oomph to my audio. Music, in particular, felt a little punchier and more expansive, though the results seemed to vary from song to song.

Software

Motorola has long been a fan of near-stock Android, and I'm glad its parent company, Lenovo, seems just as fond of it. The Phab 2 Pro ships with a build of Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow that has been left almost completely untouched. Seriously, there are no extra widgets, no visual junk, no bloatware. If you put the Tango-specific stuff aside, there are but a few add-ons: an app for simple file sharing, another for cloud backups, a sound recorder, a Dolby Atmos app for audio tuning and Accuweather. The rest of Lenovo's work on the software front is much subtler, and largely meant to make using such a big phone easier.

Rather than picking up the phone to see what time it is, for instance, you can toggle an option to wake the device by double-tapping the screen. Still another option causes the lock screen's PIN-input pad and the phone's dialer pad to slide to the left or right depending on how the Phab 2 is tilted so you don't have to stretch your thumbs across the screen.

1 / 15

And you're in luck if you've been looking for a smarter alternative to the traditional home button. There's an option for a floating on-screen button that provides quick access to all three traditional Android navigation keys, plus the screen lock, calculator, audio recorder and flashlight. I don't know about you, but I don't need to whip out a calculator all that often, so the inability to change any of those shortcuts is a little frustrating. You can add a second page of app shortcuts too, though the resulting grid of icons looks pretty ugly.

Lenovo's light touch with software is appreciated, but it's far from perfect. Certain apps (here's looking at you, Gmail) offer notifications that are hard to read because some of the text is too dark against the translucent-gray notification shade. The problem is even worse when you're using a dark wallpaper, and surprise: A good chunk of the included wallpapers, including the one that's on by default, do indeed fall into that category.

Life with Tango

As I write this, there are 35 Tango apps available in the Google Play Store, and broadly speaking, they fall into one of two categories: tools and games. I'm not going to dissect all of them -- not unless you all really, really want me to -- but there are recurring themes across these apps that speak to the larger experience of living with Tango.

Despite all the whimsical, weird stuff we've seen Tango do in the past, Google is making it clear the tech can help you get stuff done, too. The Phab 2 Pro ships with Google's Measure app, for one, which does exactly what its name suggests. Fire up the app, point at something, tap to drop an anchor, then tap to drop an anchor at that something's endpoint. Congratulations, you just measured something without having to grab a tape measure. The Lowe's Vision app has a similar trick, and when Tango's sensors cooperate, the results can be very accurate indeed.

That's definitely not a given, though. Let's say you're measuring the edge of a box or a desk. The depth sensor sometimes has trouble figuring out where the edge begins, and you have to maneuver just right to tap on the correct spot. (To Google's credit, Measure says it offers estimates instead of hard numbers.)

Tango recurring theme No. 1: The Phab 2 Pro occasionally fails at figuring out what it's pointed at, even in bright conditions.

Speaking of, we've seen Lowe's app used in Tango demos for ages now. In fact, the Phab 2 Pro will even be sold in select Lowe's stores. Even so, it's still fun filling an empty room with virtual ovens, sofas and end tables. Online retailer Wayfair has a similar app, which generally seems to work much better; the dressers and couches and cabinets I've dropped into the world around me were faster to load and didn't randomly appear right on top of me as in the Lowe's app. In fact, the Wayfair app is a joy to use at least partially because it doesn't try to do too much -- just plop furniture down, and that's it. Same goes for Amazon's Product Preview app, which lets you see how different TVs would look on your wall. It does one thing, and does it well.

Tango recurring theme No. 2: When it comes to augmented reality apps, the simpler the better.

Tango's tools aren't just about seeing how junk fits in your home, by the way. One of my early favorites is Signal Mapper, which prompts you to wander around and visualize how strong your WiFi signal is (future versions will support cellular networks, too). Keep at it long enough, and you're left with a signal-strength heat map that doubles as a rough blueprint of... wherever you happen to be. Then there are apps like Cydalion, meant to help visually impaired persons get around more easily. In brief, these apps provide audio and touch feedback when someone gets too close to a nearby object.

Tango recurring theme No. 3: The technology might not be perfect yet, but the potential here is just astounding.

So, yes, there are plenty of Tango utilities for you to play with. But let's be real: The first thing I did after receiving the Phab 2 Pro was load up a handful of games. As it turns out, though, games are where Tango's shortcomings become most apparent. We've seen some of these augmented-reality games before, like Domino World, which scans your surroundings and lets you build convoluted structures out of those tiny tiles. But there's a tendency for the app to think a flat surface like a tabletop goes is longer than it really is, so you'll often build a long string of dominos that jut out into the air, just waiting to be knocked over.

Other games, like Woorld, are heavier on the whimsy. Designed in part by Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, Woorld turns the space around you into a playground where the only real goal is figuring out how to find new pieces -- like a sun, clouds, sprouts and picnic tables -- to add your tiny domain. It's cute, it's fun and I blew the better part of an afternoon on it. Woorld is, by the way, the one game I played that really threw the Phab 2 Pro for a loop. It was the second time I had fired up the game, and less than 10 minutes after I started plopping cottages and clouds and sprouts on a conference room desk, the real-world view provided by the RGB camera nearly ground to a halt.

I'm not exactly sure what caused the issue -- maybe a memory leak somewhere -- but it hasn't happened again. Suffice to say, this sort of laggy behavior was an exception, not the rule. I'm actually still surprised that the Phab 2 Pro performed these AR tasks as well as it did, but I probably shouldn't have been: This phone was supposed to launch at the end of the summer, and it's clear Google and Lenovo used the extra time to do some tightening up.

Even so, the software is buggy. Playing Phantogeist, the ghost-blasting game I mentioned in the beginning of this review, was great until said ghost spookily hunkered down inside a wall, rendering my lightning-gun-thing useless. When it wandered back into the field, I nuked it from a distance and continued doing that to all its nasty, noncorporeal friends.

Tango recurring theme No. 4: When everything works the way it's supposed to, Tango can feel like magic.

These past two years have turned Tango into a functional product, but it's a long way from seamlessly good. There were, however, plenty of those moments where everything came together just so and I felt I like I was playing with a tricorder pulled out of storage on the USS Enterprise. Some of these issues will be addressed in future Tango hardware -- Google's Tango program lead Johnny Lee has said more is coming -- but here's hoping software fixes patch up some of these early troubles. The potential benefits are just too great to give up on.

Camera

Since the Phab 2 Pro's 16-megapixel camera plays such an important role in making Tango's augmented reality work, you'd think Lenovo would've chosen a top-flight sensor. Not quite, but it has its moments. When the conditions are right -- by which I mean there's plenty of light -- the camera yields detailed shots with colors that are mostly true to life. Pro tip: You'll probably want HDR mode on all the time to give your photos a dose of verve that would otherwise be missing.

My biggest gripe so far has been the finicky autofocus, an issue that only gets more bothersome in low light. Our office already has a Christmas tree in the lobby, and it posed no problem for the iPhone 7 Plus or the Galaxy S7. The Phab 2 Pro, on the other hand, refused to lock onto the tree no matter how many times I tapped to focus on the screen. This doesn't happen all the time, but it's a pervasive enough issue that Lenovo should really issue a software update to address it.

I wish I could say the 8-megapixel front camera was better, but it has a lot of trouble accurately rendering colors in selfies. Take me, for example: Around this time of year I'm sort of a pale, milky coffee color, an observation backed up by selfies taken with the iPhone 7 Plus and the Galaxy S7. For reasons beyond comprehension, though, the Phab 2 Pro's front camera made me a deep orange-brown. That's with the face-smoothing mode off and everything else set to auto, too. Seriously disappointing, Lenovo.

1 / 23

The camera app itself isn't much to write home about, either. Sure, there might not be much in the way of manual controls, but there are eight scene modes, a "touchup" mode for cleaning up your face in selfies and some basic white balance and exposure controls. The thing is, they're tucked away inside a settings menu, making them easy to miss. It's just bad design. (Then again, looking at the interface Lenovo slapped together, is another bit of bad design really a surprise?)

Because the Phab 2 Pro is all about augmenting reality, it's no shock that there's an AR mode within the camera app too. Tapping the AR button brings up a live view of what's in front of you (duh) along with options to turn that space into some sort of bizarre fairy garden (complete with freaky child-fairy) or a playground for a kitty, a puppy or a chubby, oddly designed dragon. Sound familiar? These sorts of AR tricks figured prominently in Sony smartphones like the Xperia X line, where they were just as hokey. They're good for a chuckle or two, but the novelty doesn't last long (unless you have kids). At least the Phab 2 Pro does a better job dispelling the heat that tends to build up during intense AR kitty play sessions.

Performance and battery life

We've already established that, beyond the occasional hiccup, the Phab 2 Pro can keep Tango apps running at a decent clip. But what about everything else? Even though the Snapdragon 625 is specifically tuned for Tango, the Phab 2 Pro should be able to handle most people's daily routines without issue. My days, for instance, are filled with lots of frantic app launching and multitasking; I'm constantly bouncing between Slack, Outlook, Spotify, Trello, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud and more for hours on end.

The Phab 2 Pro took that mild insanity like a champ, with occasional stutters punctuating long stretches of smoothness. Not bad. If your day features a lot of hardcore gaming, however, you might want to look elsewhere. Graphically intense games like Asphalt 8 (with the visual settings cranked to the max) sometimes proved to be a little much for the Phab 2 Pro. In other words, don't freak out if you see the occasional jerkiness or dropped frame. Though this is an important device, you're not exactly getting flagship-level power.

I was also expecting more from the Phab 2 Pro's 4,050mAh battery -- it's the biggest I've seen in a recent smartphone, after all. The usage time skewed more middle-of-the-road than I expected, but that's still sort of a win after all the time I've spent playing with Tango apps. Since seeing the sun for any appreciable period of time now requires me to be up early, I usually pulled the Phab 2 Pro off its charger at around 6:45AM, then put it through the daily wringer, with lots of time to get acquainted with Tango. I mean, who could resist?

Over the course of a few days like that, the phone settled into a predictable pattern: It'd power through 12-hour workdays just fine with about 10 percent to 15 percent left in the tank. On weekends, when I spent much less time glued to the phone, it generally stuck around for closer to two days on a charge.

Things were a little less promising in Engadget's standard rundown test, wherein we loop a high-definition video with the phone connected to WiFi and the screen's brightness fixed at 50 percent. The Phab 2 Pro lasted for 12 hours and 8 minutes -- 20 minutes less than the Google Pixel, and a full two hours less than the larger Google Pixel XL. Such is the downside of having to power such a big display.

Wrap-up

The Lenovo Phab 2 Pro is an incredible thing, and it's just brimming with potential. It's also unpolished and frustrating to use a lot of the time. When the hardware and software don't come together as they should, it makes me wish Google and Lenovo had spent a little more time ironing out the bugs. But when everything does come together -- which happens frequently -- I feel like I'm playing with something from the future.

Even so, there's work to be done. Hardly any of the Tango apps available for the Phab 2 Pro feel like killer apps. As developers continue to get a feel for what Tango is capable of, we'll see the platform become more useful -- at least, I hope so. Part of that growth hinges on people starting to adopt Tango devices like the Phab 2 Pro, but it's pretty clear that in its current form, no one needs this phone. For all Lenovo's work cramming Tango into a well-built body, the Phab 2 Pro still feels like a proof of concept. If you're a developer or an early adopter, then by all means, go get one.

Everyone else should remember that Tango doesn't end with this phone. It's special, it's immersive and I think it could be huge for the future of mobile computing. It just needs time. I'm glad the Phab 2 Pro exists, but if there were ever a phone that wasn't meant for everyone, this is it. The race is on now, though, and who knows? Maybe the next device with this tech is the one that truly delivers on Tango's promise.