Lenovo has finally launched its gaming phone for 2021, named the Legion Duel 2 (In China, it is named Legion 2 Pro), which, as the name suggests, succeeds the last year’s Legion Duel. There are some things that the new one has which were there on the last year’s model too, such as a side pop-up selfie camera, a centered rear camera setup, Legion logo with that lights up, a display with no notch or hole-punch cutouts, stereo front-firing speakers, etc.
But, there are many new additions like the much cleaner design on the back, not two, four, or six but eight trigger buttons, twin cooling fans, the largest vapor chamber in a phone (as claimed by Lenovo), etc.
This time, the back design is pretty clean, with all the RGB stuff happening in the middle, where there is a module featuring the camera setup, the cooling fan, LEGION branding, and a big logo. RGB is there for not just the logos but also the cooling fan, so that’s dope. Now, one reason for this centered placement for the cameras and other stuff is that this phone is meant for gamers, and so it is all about horizontal usage. All the major components like the motherboard, CPU, GPU, etc., are there in the center, and on either side of this module are two batteries, 2,750mAh each (5,500mAh).
Just like last year, there are two USB Type-C ports on this phone, one on the bottom and the other on the side. And you can use two charging cables at the same time to charge the batteries fully in just half an hour, thanks to the 90W Fast Charging support. Lenovo says that the cooling system on this phone is so much upgraded that it offers 30% thermal efficiency improvement compared to the last year’s Legion Duel.
The Legion Duel 2 features a massive 6.92-inch display, and it is an AMOLED panel with a 144Hz refresh rate and up to 720Hz touch-sampling rate. The peak brightness of this panel is 1,300 nits and is protected with Gorilla Glass 5. There is Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 SOC, and that’s the least surprising aspect of this phone since we do expect a gaming phone in 2021 to feature the best Qualcomm chipset. It is paired with up to 18GB LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB UFS 3.1 storage. It looks like the ROG Phone 5 got a competitor with the same insane storage options.
The dual cameras on the rear include a primary 64 Megapixel shooter, and it is an OmniVision OV64A sensor with an individual pixel size of 1-micron and support for 8K video recording. There is a secondary 16 Megapixel shooter for taking ultrawide shots. The side pop-up mechanism has a 44 Megapixel selfie camera in it, able to shoot up to 4K videos.
This is a gaming phone, so there are some elegant gaming-centric features like four shoulder buttons on the side. And that’s not it! Lenovo went all out this time and added two more touch-capacitive buttons on the rear of the phone. Then there are two force-touch keys on the front. So in total, this phone has eight trigger buttons, so you get a console-like experience while playing games.
Lenovo also offers Legion Game Dock that you can use to attach the Legion Duel 2 to a display, and there are USB ports so you can attack various peripherals like a gamepad, mouse, and keyboard too! There are stereo front-firing speakers with Dolby Atmos, and thanks to all of this crazy stuff, the Legion Duel 2 weighs 259g.
Finally, Android 11 runs out of the box with Lenovo’s custom skin on top. The phone comes in two colors – Ultimate Black and Titanium White. Here is the pricing of the phone globally –
- 12GB RAM + 256GB ROM – €799
- 16GB RAM + 256GB ROM – €999
- 18GB RAM + 512GB ROM – €1099
The shipping is expected to begin after a month in Europe.