NEW YORK—Lenovo is ready to tango — with Google's Project Tango technology, which brings augmented reality to a Lenovo smartphone.
At the Lenovo Tech World event taking place today in San Francisco, the Chinese tech giant let attendees see the first Tango-based handset that consumers will be able to buy: the comparatively mammoth-sized Lenovo PHAB2 Pro smartphone that is coming out in September.
Lenovo has been working with Google for about a year on Tango, which has elements of augmented reality and virtual reality. Google has been selling a $512 Tango development kit tablet to phone manufacturers, and Lenovo claims a six-month headstart over rivals.
Tango is what makes this $499 phablet device particularly newsworthy, but the PHAB2 Pro, along with two less expensive and non-Tango-capable PHAB2 models are also the first smartphones in the U.S. to carry the Lenovo brand. Separately, Lenovo-owned Motorola continues to launch Moto-branded phones in this country, including a couple of new modular flagship Droids that were also introduced at Tech World.
The Tech World event is a showcase for the Chinese company that most tech watchers in this country first paid attention to 11 years ago when it bought IBM’s PC business and the well-known ThinkPad line of laptops. Today, Lenovo ships more PCs globally than any other company and also sells phones in overseas markets.
The PHAB2 Pro will be sold here at Lenovo.com, in Best Buy, and in select Lowes stores.
AUGMENTED DIY SHOPPING
The Lowes connection is interesting because the retailer is one of the first to exploit Tango’s capabilities as a device that senses physical motion and contextually maps out the space around it. Lowes will be bringing out a Tango-enabled app called Lowes Vision that promises to let you use the phone to visualize how appliances, a backsplash or other household items will look in the room you would envision putting them in.
This is accomplished through a trio of core technologies: motion tracking, depth perception and area learning, which as Google explains, lets Tango devices see and remember the key visual features of a physical space—the edges, corners, and other unique features—so that it can recognize the area again later.
The phone has a fast-focus 16- megapixel rear camera, and various motion and depth sensors. Such sensors can capture more than 250,000 measurements a second, Lenovo says. It also has three microphones and relies on audio technology from Dolby. Inside is a Quad-Core Qualcomm processor that has been optimized for Tango.
IT'S BIG
Tradeoff: This is one mother of a device size-wise which immediately becomes apparent when you place it as I did next to an iPhone 6 Plus and Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. At 0.57 pound, you feel the PHAB2 Pro’s relative heft.
I didn’t get to check out the Lowes app during a preview, but I did get a glimpse of other augmented reality-like experiences. Peering through the Quad HD 6.4-inch PHAB2 Pro display, I got to walk around virtual dinosaurs—the technology overlays such virtual objects and characters on top of your real life physical environment.
I did this without having to put on any headgear, as is the case with other augmented or virtual reality devices that are out now or coming soon. That said, the software I got to try out briefly was by no means a finished product
There's also going to be gaming apps. For example, I got to see how you can line up virtual dominos on a physical table. And I got to shoot at menacing robots that inhabited the meeting room I was in.
Other potential use cases for Tango include indoor navigation--helping you, say, find your way inside a subway stop, casino, or hotel.
Lenovo expects about 25 Tango apps to be available at launch and about 100 by year end.
For all its promise and potential, I wouldn’t expect this first device go mainstream. But early adopter types will be intrigued and I can only imagine specialized business use cases where it may make sense to Tango.
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter
