GOOGLE TANGO ON LENOVO'S PHAB 2 PRO: A WORK IN PROGRESS

There’s a lot going on with the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro smartphone, a

dizzying array of things to consider. The first is that it’s massive, barely qualifying as a phone, with a 6.4-inch display and hard, chamfered edges that make it feel like a weaponized phablet. The second thing to consider is that this a Lenovo phone. For people in China, India, or Vietnam, this is not an anomaly. But in the US, where we prize our high-priced iPhones and Samsungs and various other Android phones, Lenovo is a brand-new entrant.

The third and most important thing to consider is this is the only device you can buy right now that supports Google Tango. Tango is Google-made software that, combined with specific hardware, offers advanced 3D sensing. If basic augmented reality creates a flat layer of digital information on your smartphone screen — think Pokémon Go, with the game content built on top of your real world — Tango goes beyond that, to the point where it interprets and measures spaces and objects around you and then lets you interact with digital things as though they’re really, physically there.

Tango still isn’t fully realized. It’s glitchy: apps sometimes freeze up or crash, and a few of its most promising apps are also the least intuitive. And there still aren’t that many apps to use with it. But when it works, it’s fun. It’s at least one step beyond a gimmick, and it’s easy to see how it could enhance the whole mobile experience if it comes to more phones.

Here’s what most people said to me when they saw the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro in my hands, in this order: Wow, that’s a huge phone, followed a few minutes later by, How did that cat get in my living room? I’ll explain the cat thing, but first, the phone hardware.

The $499.99 Phab 2 Pro is big hunk of brushed aluminum alloy with a 6.4-inch quad-HD display. Its physical build really isn’t bad once you get past the size: the display is coated in Gorilla Glass and it has shiny aluminum edges that give it a solid feel. It has a fingerprint sensor on the back; loud, powerful speakers; fast charging capabilities; it even has — wait for it — a headphone jack. And as with most larger phones, it accommodates a giant battery.

THE PHAB 2 PRO HAS THREE REAR CAMERAS, WHICH ARE A CRITICAL PART OF THE TANGO EXPERIENCE

The guts are what make this a midrange phone, not a premium one. It runs on a customized version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 652 processor, which is okay but doesn’t match the performance of Qualcomm’s current top-of-the-line mobile processor, the Snapdragon 821. When it comes to still images, its cameras are pretty subpar; even in average, stable conditions, like under office lighting, photos snapped with the 16-megapixel rear camera looked noisy.

But the cameras are where things get interesting, because they’re a part of the Google Tango experience that comes with this phone. There are three cameras on the back of the phone, plus the standard selfie camera on the front. In addition to the rear 16-megapixel RGB camera, the Phab 2 Pro has a wide-angle fisheye camera and another camera with an infrared emitter. These, combined with the accelerometer, gyroscope, Snapdragon processor, and a custom-built depth sensor module, all make Tango work.

Normally, you know where you’re going and what objects lie in front of you when you’re moving through a three-dimensional space, but the phone doesn’t. In this case, the phone does. It not only tracks motion, but also has depth perception thanks to the IR emitter and other sensors. So when you’re running a Tango app, the cameras are mapping out an area, sensing depth, and remembering the space around you (you can actually see the IR emitter flickering while you’re running an app).