Lenovo Legion Phone Duel review: A god among gaming phones?

 

Quick verdict

There is nothing better when it comes to games, with streamlined design and technological additions to improve the gaming experience. Based on that design, there is a trade-off in everyday use - but you get a lot of (gaming) phones for your money.

Read the complete verdict

For

Designed around gamers

Great quality of sound

Power and Performance Loads

Speeds of super-fast charging

 Against

Buggy with apps

Getting hotter than you would imagine

The cameras are a little awkward

(Pocket-lint) - The Legion brand of Lenovo is a regular on the PC gaming front, so it might not be shocking for the company to set up its dedicated gaming phone under these auspices.

It's a business segment that has seen plenty of action in recent years, with Asus using its ROG brand to the same end, and everyone trying the same thing with Razer, Black Shark and Red Magic.

But will a gaming battleground be ruled by the Lenovo Legion?

Designed for gaming

• Dimensions: 169.2 x 78.5 x 10mm / Weight: 239g
• In-screen fingerprint scanner
• Pop-up side camera
• Stereo speakers
• Rear RGB logo

The Legion Phone does not have anything subtle. "stylish outside, savage inside"stylish outside, wild inside. When the light catches it, it shimmers, based around a central LED decoration, in the same way as a gaming PC with RGB lighting flaunts its items.

The branding of the Legion can be set to glow, and when playing, as a warning or when charging, the rear logo can be set to pulse. Thankfully, you get full power, so that when charging at night, you can turn off the red flash.

The Legion is a large phone with a flat display and healthy bezels, allowing you somewhere to grip and risk unintended touches without obscuring the display, while the front-facing camera is a pop-up device on the phone's landscape side. Yeah, the camera has relocated absolutely to save you from notches or punch-holes - and to ensure face-time in-game.

Many of these decisions benefit the market in a way that other phones do not: there is no camera hump to get in the way; it is impossible to obscure the large speakers at either end of the display with a hand; and there is even a charging port on the side so you can simultaneously charge and play.

And a lot of what we love. We spend many hours each day playing games, so several of these things specifically appeal to us. The Legion Phone feels clean to keep and play, the sound quality and volume are great, there is grip. Standard gaming telephones compromise, but this one does not.

But this gaming-specific style has a cost and that's in the everyday experience. You have to deal with compromises that have been made to help gaming the other 7 or 8 hours of the day when you're not head-down in the newest shooter.

Your hands are shielded the majority of the time by those rear cameras that are out of the way while playing. To take a shot, open the shutter and you'll invariably have a hand in the way. The same applies to the front pop-out camera - it opens through your fingers or hand if you're holding the phone and want to take a selfie.

There's also no doubt that at 236g this is a big phone and also very chunky by nature. It's larger and heavier than the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra - but there's a bigger display on the Samsung handset. Again, during everyday use, some of the extra bodywork of the Legion can be a bit of a detriment, even though it is appropriate to experienced gamers.

Hardware and performance

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus, 16GB RAM, 512GB storage
• 5,000mAh battery, 90W fast-charge via dual USB-C
• Heat dissipation and liquid cooling system
  

Performance was put at the forefront of the experience of the Legion Phone and that explains many of the choices behind this phone. But while attempts have been made to meet higher requirements, it doesn't hold together as well as you would expect.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 856 Plus, 5G enabled, with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, is at the center of this phone. It's a monster loadout and, considering how much phone you get, compared to a lot of the rest of the market, it's good value for cash.

And we can't blame a lot of the results, even if the heat dissipation and cooling system isn't persuasive. Lenovo spoke a lot about this, but you can feel the heat under your fingertips from the Snapdragon 865 towards the centre of the phone. The Legion Phone feels significantly hotter under load after reviewing the Sony Xperia 5 II and the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE, both on Snapdragon 865 and both exposed to similar long periods of gameplay.

That makes us wonder how much here is really productive and how much is only part of the marketing kit to drive the angle of gaming. Certainly, when set alongside rival flagship units, the in-game experience is not enormously different from a performance point of view.

For the Legion phone, Lenovo has more accessories, like a cooling unit, but do you really want to add more weight? At the same time, it might just be due to the fact that your fingertips still rest on the hottest part of the phone.

The massive battery capacity of 5000mAh is also appreciated. It is divided into two cells, the selling here is that you can charge super-fast at the same time using the two USB inputs at 90W. The package has a charger that will also give you two USB connections, so you don't need to have two separate chargers (although that also works). Depending on how you tie it up, you'll get one or two charging logos when attached, and we have to agree that the charger on the side is convenient for charging when playing games or watching movies.

But the battery life isn't incredibly efficient. It drives a wide monitor, it also drives up to 144Hz refresh rate, there's large volume and brightness, so there's plenty of battery drainage.

Move out of gaming, and yeah, it's going to get you quickly enough during the day, but this is still a big screen, and it can suffer from big phone issues. The Legion Phone is very much on a par with other Snapdragon 865 devices with everything that said - it's fast and smooth, with very little evidence of any slowdown.

Display

• 6.65-inch AMOLED, 2340 x 1080 resolution
• 144Hz refresh rate, 240ms response

A 144Hz refresh rate is provided by Lenovo's big play with the monitor - the same as you can find on many gaming PCs. Faster refresh rates have been pushed by smartphones - 90Hz, 120Hz - but 144Hz is less popular. Is there a big difference? Not exactly, but it is for bragging rights there.

The games you're playing are something you really need to remember, as not all endorse those higher frame rates. Some will run at 144Hz, like Real Racing 3 - and it looks glorious - but PUBG Mobile is 40Hz, while Call of Duty Mobile is 60Hz (although it is available on other devices at higher frame rates).

What's more promising is that you can check the refresh rate you get thanks to the programme from Lenovo and make sure that you actually get the value when you make adjustments to the settings of the game.

Step aside from that, and given that frame rate is the target rather than absolution resolution, the 1080p resolution is not a surprise, not that Full HD + is poor per se on a 6.5-inch display. The monitor itself is bright and vivid - something you expect from an AMOLED screen - and that, like watching movies, plays through into other content as well.

Overall, it's difficult to fault the efficiency of the show. But there is one quirk: it was totally blank on the show settings tab. It's not the end of the world as you can change the brightness from the fast settings and inside the Legion Realm settings you can adjust the frame rate - but it's one of a number of cracks in the software of Lenovo that shows that it's not on a par with the experience provided by, say, Samsung or OnePlus.

Cameras

• Dual rear camera:
  • Main: 64-megapixel, f/1.9 aperture
  • Wide: 16MP, f/2.2
• 20MP front camera, f/2.2
  

The rear of the Legion Phone features two cameras, a 64-megapixel main camera and an ultra-wide 16-megapixel camera. It's good that Lenovo has spared us the trash lenses that are so popular - no depth sensor, monochrome sensor or macro camera is in sight (although on the main camera there is a macro mode that works better than any other dedicated macro lens we've seen elsewhere.)

That gives a few fair cameras, combining the primary 64-megapixel pixel to offer 16-megapixel results. Actually, it's a capable camera, capable of offering some fantastic shots, but it prefers good lighting, unable to raise the photos like you might get when the light drops from something like Google Pixel.

That said, there is a night mode that allows for longer exposures and works sufficiently well. Photography is not the primary focus of this phone, but you don't have to feel left out, because you can get a good picture in most instances.

In order to offer more pleasing shots, there is an AI mode that will add HDR contrast and improve colours, and the portrait mode also works pretty well.

There's a little fiddle in there, which is the zoom icon. It leaps from 1x to 2x (entirely digital), then back to 1x and then, on repeated clicks, to 0.6x (ultra-wide angle). It escapes us how anyone felt that this was a good user experience. To access the lens, we would much prefer a 0.6x button all the time. Of course, you can press to switch from 0.6x to 8x optical zoom across the entire range.

When it comes to selfies, the front camera may be a bit of a fiddle because it has to deploy moves you into landscape orientation so that portrait selfie fans can think it's just a little weird on the phone's hand. There is some beauty treatment that is on by default and needs to be switched off as it strips out contrast, resulting in lacklustre photos. It is also worth discovering and turning off the watermark feature of the camera unless you are very keen on pushing the fact that you are using the Legion Phone Duel.

We have concerns about the front camera's long-term reliability as well. We've found dust getting in and around the camera is a regular occurrence over the course of the time we've been using the phone. In one occasion, we even had the camera malfunction, opening and attempting to take a picture, but then making some griding noises and crashing the camera without saving the picture.

Software for gaming and life

• Android 10 with ZUI
• Legion Realm

At the time of writing, the Legion Phone Duel runs Google Android 10, but is skinned with Lenovo's ZUI. That's something we see less frequently in the US and Europe where Lenovo phones are now uncommon - and shipping with a near-stock Android offering for Motorola phones (the company also owned by Lenovo).

To suit the Legion Tablet, much of what you get at ZUI is themed. There's the option of an offensive gaming theme or Android theme that you're faced with at startup - however, in our view, the Android theme never gets close enough to a stock experience. There are some fun animated wallpapers, some meaty sound effects to fit the rear flashing lights, to round out the impression that there is something unique about this device.

The programme, with certain oddities, is a little hit and miss. For instance, the phone seems to wake up most of the time with the lockscreen in the landscape, even when you keep it in a portrait. There's very little control over the home screen either - as a consequence, you can't resist adding new app icons and making new pages, and we have seen Google Discover appear and vanish from the slot to the left of the home page as if it had a mind of its own.

We've previously discussed the blank display settings tab, and if it wasn't for duplicating settings in the Legion Realm app or modifying any settings through the Fast Settings Pad, you'd be stuck.

As most of the Legion Realm experience, such as the swipe-down in-game control panel, will just disappear if you don't give permission the first time you encounter it (seriously, we spent several weeks wondering why it wasn't there before we reset the phone and tried again). You also have to be very cautious to approve permissions you're asked for.

With the key support of the updates here to add to the gaming options, there are not many additions and very few duplication of apps. With a swipe down from the top of the screen, the above swipe-down panel gives you access to features such as power boost, brightness controls, screenshots and recording, as well as stats at a glance - such as the frame rate and temperature.

You can see what frame rate you're really getting relative to what you expect, thanks to these details - and you can see how fast the phone is warming up. It is important to note that the refresh rate differs between the lobby and the game itself in many games.

When you start such games, the Legion Realm app automatically adds and runs games, allowing you to specify certain parameters - you can disable auto-brightness, such as blocking calls and alerts, and other game choices.

The nice thing Legion Realm does is provide tighter gesture navigation power, requiring a double swipe up from the bottom to exit a game. That's awesome, because it prevents the unintended swipes that often leave a game on other phones that you can see.

Unfortunately, when it comes to adding apps - such as Google Lens or the Alexa app that appears - Legion Realm is really guessing and thinks they are games. If a game is misidentified by Realm, it means you have to double swipe to leave something like Alexa. You can manually delete those apps, but we find they creep back in again, so it seems an ongoing issue.

Unfortunately, when it comes to adding apps - such as Google Lens or the Alexa app that appears - Legion Realm is really guessing and thinks they are games. If a game is misidentified by Realm, it means you have to double swipe to leave something like Alexa. You can manually delete those apps, but we find they creep back in again, so it seems an ongoing issue.

There are some other options in the game, such as a back record, which allows you to save recent photos, so you can save your unforgettable moments, as well as the Y Triggers at the top of your phone. There are pressure-sensitive areas, such as a shortcut to the games, that you can use to launch Legion Realm and can also be mapped to positions on the computer.

The Y Triggers could be used as key controls, like shoulder buttons on console controllers, maybe for acceleration and accelerating, to hold your fingers off the monitor or for other controls. Of course, you'll have to adjust to using them, which is our greatest barrier - for those games you've already invested a lot of effort into, you have to conquer muscle memory, so you can never use them.

Verdict

The Duel of the Lenovo Legion is very good at what it seeks to do. The combination of a large monitor, unique gaming features and amazing sound quality makes for a great gaming phone.

There are some quirks - it appears to get hotter than its competitors - and around the gaming element there are some software oddities. But, on the whole, playing is a fantastic experience.

Where the phone really struggles is in the daily job of just being a phone. It's voluminous, it has a preference for the use of landscape orientation, and we're not convinced that the pop-up camera will be completely reliable, which will be a downside for those who want a phone to last for the next few years of daily use.

Ultimately, however, for your money, the Legion Duel offers a lot. There are downsides, but there are choices to be made: there's a lot here for you if you spend much of your time playing games; if you're a more casual player, then there are lighter phones with more refined apps and just as much electricity.

Also consider

Nubia Red Magic 5G

One of the first phones to arrive with a 144Hz display was the Red Magic 5G, giving the Legion Phone Duel a near role in terms of specifications.

Black Shark 3

Black Shark is Xiaomi's gaming brand, with a range of accessories to boost the package's appeal, offering much the same proposition as the Legion Phone.