Gaming phones weren’t a massive hit when they started coming to market with gaming focused features and hardware. However, the manufacturers persevered and the segment is picking up steam quickly, partly due to cloud gaming services like Google Stadia and Xbox Game Pass becoming more popular. The new Lenovo Legion Phone Duel 2 looks to take the gaming experience to the extreme and take advantage of the segment momentum.
Read: LG will update Android phones for three years
The Lenovo Legion Phone Duel 2 is a fresh design, unlike any other smartphone. It has been completely designed in landscape orientation, as this is how gamers will use the phone more often than not.
Its “octa-triggers” include four ultrasonic shoulder keys, two rear and two in-display touchpoints. The touchpoints are on a 6.92-inch Samsung E4 AMOLED display that supports 144Hz refresh rate. Furthermore, the display supports a touch sampling rate of 720Hz, although we imagine it won’t be noticeable compared to the 360Hz touch sampling rate on other gaming phones. The 8-bit HDR display is said to offer 3.8ms response time, always top of mind for serious gamers.
As you would imagine, it also has top-of-the-line specs. It has the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chipset you’ll find in all Android flagships this year. It has up to 18GB of RAM (yes, you read that correctly), helping keep premium games running buttery smooth. It also has fast UFS 3.1 storage up to 512GB.
Gaming phones need large batteries, and with the Lenovo Legion Phone Duel 2 you get a capacity of 5,500mAh, split between two cells of 2,750mAh on either side of the large central bump. It has some of the fastest charging available on any phone, up to 90W. It achieves this with two charging cables output from the same charging brick, plugging into the two USB-C ports. The two cells are charged in parallel, each sucking 45W of power from its respective cables.
All the other internals are housed in the central bump. Firstly, it means the device is a lot more comfortable to hold (as the sides only has the batteries). It also means the areas your hands rest on don’t get as warm, tends to happen with smartphones doing a lot of work like with intensive games.
That central bump borrows a feature from Lenovo’s gaming laptops – it has a twin-turbo fan active cooling system. One is an intake fan pumping cool air into the chassis, while the second expels the hot air from the other side of the device.
Cameras are an afterthought with gaming phones, but it comes with a main 64MP shooter at the back paired with a 16MP ultra-wide lens. A 44MP pop-up selfie shooter is housed on the right edge of the device to maintain the landscape-first view of the device, and can stream directly to YouTube or Twitch.
In Europe the top of the line device costs €999.
