Hey what’s up guys! Now instead of typically going through every single feature of the Lenovo Legion Phone Duel, I’ve decided to put a “gaming hat” on and look at this phone’s usage from a gaming perspective, since this is more of a gaming smartphone, so let’s check it out.
(articles continues after the review video)
Design & Built
First, looking at the phone’s build quality and design. The phone had a quite premium build and quite a decent heft to it.
Like what you would usually find in a gaming smartphone, the device was a bit thicker than a typical flagship phone to give you a proper grip when playing games and the matte finish at the sides also had a semi squared-off edges also helps with that.
In front, there is a flat screen display with an in-display fingerprint sensor which unlocks REALLY fast. Then at the back, you will find the phone’s unique design, where firstly, the cameras are placed in the middle just slightly towards the top, with no camera bump at all so you won’t have a wobbly smartphone.
If you are holding the phone in a landscape position, you will find a text which says “Stylish Outside” on the left and Savage Inside on the right and right in the middle you will find a nice illuminated Legion Logo at back, where it is customizable to change colours under Gaming, Incoming Call, Notification and Charging, with different motion effects as well.
Looking at the ports and buttons, again on a landscape position, you will find SIM ejector slot and the one out of two USB-C ports on the right, where the other is below next to the volume rockers. Why there are two USB-C ports you ask? Well, stay till the end of this video… And on top, there is the power button.
Display
So a gaming phone with a horrible ugly notch or any sort out camera cut-out is a huge deal breaker for most people and me included and the good news is that the phone comes with a 6.65 inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels, with HDR 10+ and up to a super high 144-hertz refresh rate, where you can toggle the option to only use the 144 hertz specifically only during gaming.
Now if you are wondering where is the front camera or even if it has one, well, Lenovo has played it smart by not only putting a pop-up camera but if you are playing a game on a landscape position, that pop-up camera comes up nicely in between right in the middle, making it as easy for play games and stream using the front camera at the same time, where the camera composition is right in the middle instead of typically on the side with additional cool filters as well. Genius!
With this, playing games on the phone for a really long time didn’t make me have any eye fatigue, and due to its great colours and brightness the details for the highlight and shadows were great when playing games to ensure that no details were missed.
Hardware
Then looking at the phone’s hardware or the “engine” that drives this phone it has the Snapdragon 865+ Chipset with the Adreno 650 GPU. The variant that I have massive 12 gigs RAM with 256 gigs of storage, and it comes with Android 10 with Legion OS ZUI version 12 skin.
Now having 12 gigs of RAM clearly shows that Lenovo was dead serious of giving us the utmost best performance as a gaming smartphone. There were no problems or any lagging issues not only when playing games but also when using the phone as my daily smartphone.
And with a really good 256 gigs of storage, you won’t have any storage anxiety when playing games on the phone, which could only mean that I could download games after games with plenty of amount of space left in the phone.
Cameras
So here is the thing, yes I know that this is a gaming smartphone review and smartphone cameras usually, in a lack of a better term, totally sucks! BUT that was not the case here as the phone has surprisingly an amazing camera on the main lens, both for photos and videos.
And the same can be said for the front camera as well and I also found that the night mode shots to be one of the best that I have seen, where the phone comes in a 64 MP, f/1.9 aperture lens and a 16 MP, f/2.2 16mm Ultrawide lens then the front camera comes with a pop-up selfie camera of a 20-megapixel f 2.2 aperture lens.
Audio
As for audio, the phone has dual front-facing stereo speakers, where the audio quality was great when it comes to playing music and playing games and surely one of the loudest smartphone speakers that I have tested, where it ranged close to up to the 90 Db mark and here is a quick sound test.
And when it comes to the Bluetooth wireless audio, it has aptX, LDAC and TWS Plus to give not only great quality audio, of course, a reduced latency as well.
Games
Diving deeper to Gaming Mode, you can go through the Gaming Menu by touching and holding both the shoulder keys at the top sides of the phone on a landscape position to launch that and this shoulder keys could be used for actions in the game as well.
And you can swipe down to go through the Legion assistance game menu where in there, there is the Ping Quality both for Wi-Fi and Sim Connectivity and the brightness slider over there.
In the middle, there is the frames per second marker, the refresh rate, the GPU and CPU performance, where there is the rampage mode to fully maximize the performance. Then you will find the temperature of the phone as well.
Then towards the right, there are additional settings like Back Recording, Controller, Stream Mode and to take a screenshot and many more. Then below you will find the audio slider as well.
Now, when it comes to the exact games that I played on the phone, I played Gear Club as usual, where the gameplay was nice and smooth with its high refresh rate.
I then tested PUBG Mobile with graphics set to HDR and Frame Rate set to Extreme and I am happy to note that it ran very well with no lag, and only a very tiny bit warmth, during a long gameplay. And it also ran great when I was playing COD Mobile as well.
And since I still have the phone with me for a while more, do let me know what games that you would like to test the phone with in the comments section below, and I will test them out for you.
Battery
And finally, none of this amazing phone’s gameplay would matter if it didn’t have a great battery, as the Lenovo Legion Phone Duel comes with a dual battery of 2500 milliamps, which bring this to a total capacity of 5000 milliamps of battery which gave an average of 5 hours and 36 mins of screen on time when I was at 8 percent battery. It lasted a total of 1 day and 29 minutes since the last charge at the 144-hertz refresh rate, which was truly amazing.
Now since there are two USB-C ports, you can charge using both ports at the SAME TIME to give you a dual turbo charge, where it gives you fast-charging up to a massive 90 watts for the 512GB variant and 65 watts for this 128GB storage variant and of course the reason why there is the two USB-C ports option is to use the one down below to charge easily while playing games.
So there you have it guys, my full gaming review with the Lenovo Legion Phone Duel. If you guys are planning to get the phone, it is priced at RM3399 and it comes in two colours. The one that I reviewed is called Blazing Blue and it also comes in Vengeance Red and where I leave a link down below.
