Augmented reality is about to take over the world of Lenovo smartphone consumers.
Lenovo unveiled its Phab2 Pro smartphone, the world's first phone to be equipped with Google's Project Tango, at its Tech World event held in San Francisco on Thursday.
The Phab2 Pro features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 processor optimized specifically for Tango apps, runs on Android Marshmallow 6.0 and has 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of ROM, which is expandable up to 126 GB via a microSD.
The phablet's aluminum unibody is 8.9 millimeter thin, weighs 9.1 ounces and features a 2.5D curved glass and a fingerprint scanner on the rear side.
And a big smartphone means a big screen. The phone has 6.4-inch QHD 1,140 x 2,560 display that can adapt to various lighting conditions such as when using the phone outdoors in the sun.
The smartphone includes a 4,050 mAh turbo charging battery with 18 hours of talk time, dual SIM slots, an 8-megapixel front-facing and 16-megapixel rear-facing camera with a depth sensor, motion-tracking and fish-eye camera and Dolby Audio Capture 5.1 sound. It comes in two color options: Champagne Gold and Gunmetal Grey.
Although sleek and stylish, of course, all that's really important about the Phab2 Pro is that it is the first consumer smartphone that has Project Tango.
Google's Project Tango is the company's augmented reality technology that consists of a set of software and 3D camera sensors that can detect and then map surroundings to make augmented reality possible.
What is means for the phablet is that the device is equipped with Tango's sensors that enable it to sense space, the surrounding objects in that space and physical motion and determine depth using motion tracking, depth perception and area learning. This is all done via the camera's sensors.
All the user has to do is hold up the smartphone and they will be able to see virtual objects appear on the screen in AR.
The device is equipped with Tango's augmented reality gaming and utility apps‚ about 25 AR apps at the time of the phablet's launch and 100 by the end of 2017. These include Lowe's Home Improvement app, which lets the user see how an item would look in the room before purchasing while they are redecorating, or education apps that bring dinosaurs to life. Then, of course, there are AR games such as a shooter, which brings an alien invasion into the house, and Raise, a game where users take care and train a 3D pet.
Lenovo's Phab2 Pro will retail starting at $499 when it comes available this August.
Source: Lenovo
