Earlier this year, news broke out that Lenovo will be expanding its Legion lineup of gaming products to smartphones. Way before its launch, a marketing video has surfaced highlighting certain interesting design choices and confirming previously rumoured specifications.
XDA Developers was able to get its hands on the unreleased video, which showed the Lenovo Legion gaming smartphone in all its glory. It gives us our first look at what the final device could look like. If this turns out to be true, we are looking at one of the most unusually designed phones of recent times.
The most interesting bit is the selfie camera that pops up from the right side of the frame instead of the top. This is likely to give a better recording experience to game streamers, as previous implementations would often get covered by their hand or be tucked away in a corner, making eye contact difficult. There also seems to be a glint of some sort on the camera, which could be a front-facing flash. How this fares in regular selfies remains to be seen.
The misplaced selfie camera could also give the Legion gaming smartphone better symmetry of the facia, with a big display flanked by speakers. It’s likely to be a big display with a 144Hz refresh rate to take advantage of the powerful internals for gaming. There will be a pair of dual front-firing speakers on either side of the display, which the video claims to offer symmetrical stereo sound output.
On the inside, the Lenovo Legion gaming smartphone will be powered by the Snapdragon 865 chipset with LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.0 storage. A “cooling tower” and dual heat pipes will take care of the thermal performance. A big 5,000mAh battery will keep the phone running, along with industry-leading 90W fast charging. We presume it will make use of the secondary USB Type-C port on the left in some way to achieve those speeds.
The cameras on the back are unusually close to the phone’s centre. This is said to be a 64MP primary shooter and a 16MP ultra-wide lens. There will be an RGB Lenovo Legion “Y” logo in the centre which will light up during certain actions (gaming being one of them). A set of shoulder buttons are also expected on the side to enable four-finger gaming.
This isn’t the first time we’re seeing a gaming smartphone try to opt for a very different design approach. While many of these features do make sense, it all depends upon the implementation. No launch date has yet been tipped for the Lenovo Legion gaming smartphone.
