(light electronic music)
- [Michael] Smartphone.
Augmented smartphone.
Reality.
Augmented Reality.
I'm Michael Fisher and this,
this is a portal to another world.
The first commercial smartphone with Tango.
It's full name is the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro.
And yes, it is a behemoth.
But it needs to be to accommodate
the sensors that make Tango work.
Some of these almost every smartphone has,
an accelerometer, a compass, a gyroscope and a camera.
The Phab 2 Pro adds two special optical sensors,
an infra-red depth detector and a motion tracking camera.
It feeds all of the data from all of the sensors
into the Tango core, special software running on
a specially tuned Snapdragon processor.
The result is a smartphone that can track
where it is in the world,
discern details about its surroundings,
like edges and corners,
and remember those details as it moves from place to place.
Put simply it has a better idea of where it is
in 3D space than any other smartphone.
Put geekily, it's a tricorder.
That lets it do some pretty awesome things.
Gaming is probably the easiest way to illustrate this.
Even if you haven't played Pokemon Go,
you're probably familiar with how it works.
Game characters pop up in a kind of
viewfinder on your phone,
so they seem to exist in the real world.
But because your phone doesn't know where the ground is
the Pokemon tend to float ambiguously
somewhere between dimensions.
With Tango the phone knows where the walls,
floor, table and ceiling are.
So characters or objects you put into the virtual world
will do a better job of conforming to those boundaries.
Some games blend the real and virtual,
like this one, Raise, that gives you a pet to take care of.
Or Towers For Tango, which lets you build
a Sim City-like structure on your floor.
Others just use motion sensing to let you navigate
inside a fully digital environment.
It's awkward and often uncomfortable to hunch
and pan your way around these games,
but it's also intoxicating in a way,
because it really does feel like you're holding
a window to another world in your hand.
And it's not just about gaming.
Remember the Phab 2 Pro can see edges,
and determine depth and distance.
That means you can measure things remotely
to see for example how long
those curtains really need to be.
Or use apps from Lowe's and Wayfair
to test fit new furniture and appliances.
You can even apply molding to your walls,
or try out a new floor material.
My favorite utility so far is Signal Mapper,
which builds a blueprint of your home or office
showing where your wifi is strongest and weakest.
The potential that Tango unlocks is incredible.
And once the early bugs gets shaken out,
I'm really going to enjoy the retail version.
Wait, what?
This thing is on sale right now?
Well then, there are some things you should know.
The software is bad.
Not because it's an older Android version,
though that is true,
but because it's so unstable.
Several of the Tango apps crash regularly.
Tango itself still seems kind of raw in the middle.
More than once the measure app has given me
wildly inaccurate dimensions.
And Lenovo's custom Android interface
basically breaks notifications.
The combination of a diffusion layer,
with both dark and light text means that no matter
what color wallpaper you choose,
your alerts will probably be unreadable.
Also the screen flickers oddly when new alerts come in.
And system apps tend to crash
almost as often as Tango titles do.
What makes it worse is that Lenovo's Motorola phones
have great software, some of the best in Android.
Why the company shipped its first self-branded phone
in the US with this load is a mystery to me.
With such a damning interface experience
will the Phab 2 Pro be worth its price tag to anyone?
Well yes, but not to many people.
And probably not as a primary phone,
its too big and too specialized for that,
which is why I'm skipping
the usual review format for this one.
But if you presume that Google will continue
updating the Tango core and that developers
will continue building Tango apps,
both safe assumptions,
then the Phab 2 Pro is a more modern,
and much more portable test platform
than the developer tablet that's been offered up 'til now.
It's also a very impressive engineering achievement
from a hardware perspective.
And Tango has real potential to redefine
what phones are capable of,
from gaming to utilities.
But as it stands now, I think the software defects
make the Phab 2 Pro a bigger miss than a hit.
Check out Lenovo's superior smartphone offerings
with my Moto Z reviews.
And subscribe on YouTube,
so you don't miss the next video from Mr. Mobile.
Until next time, thanks for watching,
and stay mobile my friends.