Lenovo Legion Phone Duel Review: Cut For Mobile Gaming

The Legion Phone Duel is based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 Plus, 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM with 512 GB of storage in UFS 3.1. Without forgetting its AMOLED screen which can go up to 144 Hz, its double battery, and its double USB-C connection. In short, an impressive smartphone on paper. Will he be able to seduce mobile gamers with such paraphernalia? We had the opportunity to test it.

Lenovo has unveiled its first Legion-stamped smartphone. Legion is his gaming brand where you can find mainly laptops. We recently tested one of the laptops from this brand, a benchmark that offers excellent value for money in 2020.

With the Legion Phone Duel, Lenovo comes up against other brands, including Asus and its ROG Phone 3. The latter is very well equipped: a 6.59-inch AMOLED screen with a refresh rate of 144 Hz without notch, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ SoC supported by 12 to 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and a 6000 mAh battery.

Lenovo Legion Phone Duel Data Sheet :

An Attractive Design :

The glass rear features metallic and holographic finishes. On the left side of the back, it is written Stylish Outside, and on the right, it is written Savage Inside. Right in the middle is the Legion logo, which glows red when the device wakes from sleep. It also lights up green when charging. The customization remains quite limited for the LED on the back.

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Its entire design has been imagined to be used in landscape mode, as you can see with the pop-up front camera that comes out of it, or even by the presence of two USB-Cs. Note that the unlock button is located above the front camera, this is an interesting design choice. In fact, the entire interface works in landscape mode. You also have tactile (ultrasonic) triggers located under the index fingers. As you can see, this is a smartphone designed for mobile gaming.

Top Performance For 2020 :

• A Qualcomm Kryo 585 Prime processor clock speed of up to 3.1 GHz, a 10% increase.
• The Qualcomm Adreno 650 GPU offers 10% faster graphics rendering.
• Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 compatibility is supposed to offer Wi-Fi 6 speeds up to 3.6 Gbps.

It is nothing more or less the same architecture as the S865 with overclocking of the CPU chip and GPU. It, therefore, heats more than an S865 and consumes more energy. For this purpose, Lenovo has installed an active cooling system to limit heating. This heater does not have a huge impact on performance, however, it will prevent burning your fingers when holding the smartphone horizontally.

As expected, the performances are there. The phone is extremely responsive, the interface is fluid and we can easily switch from an app to a game. With its 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM associated with 512 GB of storage in UFS 3.1, we could almost take this Legion Phone for a laptop.

We had fun comparing an iPhone 11 Pro (Apple A13 Bionic) to the Lenovo Legion Phone Duel on the same game: Genshin Impact. As you can see, the two images look very similar at first glance. However, looking at it in detail, the rendering is slightly cleaner on iPhone. In any case, these two smartphones certainly offer very good performance for this type of game. The comparison is interesting, as the Snapdragon 865 Plus is often compared to the Apple A13 Bionic as the two SoC have comparable performance in many tasks.

This comparison also leads us to explain to you that … while the boosted Snapdragon 865+ is impressive, it is less powerful than the Apple A14 Bionic that powers the iPhone 12 (and 12 Pro). Fortunately, the Legion Phone has this 144 Hz screen on its side… that few mobile games use. Among the 144 Hz compatible games, we noted: Alto’s Adventure, Arma Mobile Ops, Battlelands Royale, Dead Trigger 2, Card Thief, Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked, Hitman Go, Lara Croft Go, Minecraft, Sonic Dash 2, Fruit Ninja, Slam Dunk… a good fifty games in total. There are also 120Hz compatible games, but this is still a minority of games compared to the entire Play Store mobile game catalog.

A 144 Hz Screen :

The Lenovo Legion Phone Duel has a 6.65-inch AMOLED display in a 19.5:9 aspect ratio in FHD + definition with a refresh rate that can go up to 144 Hz. It is a display designed for gaming. Obviously, you’ll have noticed that it has 1080p resolution instead of 1440p, but for gaming, it’s common to sacrifice some definition for a higher refresh rate.

In practice, this is a good AMOLED display that shows excellent performance.

• RGB: 202 %
• DCI-P3: 135 %
• Average Delta E on DCI-P3: 4.65
• Temperature: 7228 K.

We recommend that you configure it in Vibrating mode, among the three display modes available. We were unable to measure the maximum brightness because it activates under very specific conditions. We measured 400 cd/m², but the screen is certainly capable of going above 600 cd/m².

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An Efficient Camera :

• a 64-megapixel main sensor.
• a 16-megapixel ultra wide angle.

Placing these two sensors right in the center of the rear panel does not necessarily facilitate vertical shooting: there is always a risk that your finger will cover the lens. So keep that in mind. Also note that, by default, the images produced to display a watermark in the lower left corner. It’s quite annoying as you will see in the images below. Fortunately, the option can be turned off.

Overall, the Lenovo Legion does a good job with daytime photos. The colorimetry is efficiently managed and when you do not use the IA mode – disabled by default – you are treated to rather natural tones, although a little warm. We are entitled to a good dynamic overall, but be careful: if you face the sun, the part of the sky concerned will tend to be overexposed. Nothing too bad, but other smartphones do better under these conditions.

By activating the camera’s AI mode, you will especially greatly increase the contrasts for more saturation. Depending on the situation, this can be an interesting aesthetic bias. However, beware, the scene then deviates markedly from reality.

At night, the main sensor is not bad, but we can clearly feel that the dive is deteriorating. Images lose sharpness quickly as you approach the edges of the immortalized scene, and strong light sources could be a bit better handled to reduce the halo effect.

In particularly dark scenes, you can use the night mode. However, don’t expect miracles: the latter works well, but the image brightening it allows at the cost of longer exposure time is only very moderate.

Also this main sensor, also allows you to take 64-megapixel photos to provide more details in the images. When the right light conditions are met, this function can be quite useful, at least the gain in sharpness is felt.

The ultra-wide angle is clearly less good in terms of fine detail and is more exposed to lens flare effects and digital noise at night. However, it does its job well by capturing more elements in the scene while maintaining some color consistency.