Earlier you hopefully found our post about the Moto Z family and the snap-on Moto Mods. You probably thought, “Oh, what a fantastic website that is, I must follow them on Twitter and then hunt down that “Gears” fella and buy him lots of beer, he’s doing a sterling job there. I can also see how he’s tried to create a witty title to this story, even though in reality there were three phones announced (the Phab2Pro, the Moto Z and the Moto Z Force), but I’ll ignore that fact and assume he meant the Moto Z and the Phab2Pro alone, because that would fit better”.
Yes. You’d be right. Lenovo announced a phablet yesterday – the Phab2Pro. It’s a handset with sensors and cameras to help it “see” and makes sense of the surroundings. With this data, it can magically add layered graphics to your view of the world. It, as you may have guessed already, is part of the Google Tango project which will see augmented reality develop further.
The handset has a massive 6.4″ QHD IPS screen with a PPI of 454. The rear camera is 16 megapixels and there’s an 8 megapixel one up front. It has Dolby Audio capture and runs a Snapragon 652 CPU with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. Here it is in action..
Basically, if you get one of these it’ll use motion and depth sensing to do clever things like superimposing items into a “real world” view of your room. Now, this is something we saw way back in 2011 and indeed you can do something similar on your phone now, but there’s no depth sensor or movement tracking, so the computer character or piece of furniture you have on your phone will ignore the “real world” items around it. As if they weren’t there effectively.
If you want to see the difference, have a look at our tour of the Metaio booth at Mobile World Congress in 2015. You’ll see how, with additional sensors, the computer-generated IKEA furniture shown suddenly becomes aware of walls and other pieces of furniture in your home.
More detail to follow..
