Design & build quality

 
Lenovo Legion Phone Duel is by all means a beast. An elegant, high-end, beautiful beast, but nevertheless… a beast. With a large flat display, two huge speaker enclosures symmetrically placed on the top and bottom, or should I say right and left, Legion Phone Duel is a glass sandwich, with a Gorilla Glass 6 layer on the front and a Gorilla Glass 5 layer on the back, which encompass a solid aluminum frame, the red accents carefully sprinkled in key points fully complementing the materials used for construction.

Nothing is “classic”, “trivial” or “boring” in the case of this particular beast – it is optimized for landscape use, specific to gaming, and you can realize that just by looking at it. The front camera is positioned on the right side (top, in portrait mode), and the power button is positioned on top of it. It is flanked by two ultrasonic shoulder keys, clearly marked, which can be easily used in games, being positioned right where the index fingers should be. The two main cameras are also positioned in the middle area of ​​the phone, allowing the us to use the phone in landscape mode without worrying about touching the cameras.

Lenovo Legion Phone Duel has two USB-C connectors – one positioned on the bottom side (right, when using the phone in landscape mode) and one used on the left side (bottom, in landscape mode). Thus, while using the phone in landscape mode, we can charge it through the underside port, without the cable interfering with our gaming. In fact, this is the USB Type-C 3.1 port, with which we can connect instantly, without the need for special settings, to a monitor or peripherals.

I used a USB-C hub to connect the phone to a Legion Y25-25 monitor, a mouse and a keyboard, both wired, and they were all instantly recognized by the phone, with the image mirrored on the monitor, without any further intervention on my part. I find this particularly interesting, both for certain games that would benefit from such a set-up, but also for writing. It is much more convenient to use a keyboard for e-mails, for example, than a phone display, and you don’t need any other device to do that, besides your phone, a monitor and a keyboard, of course.

However, Lenovo Legion Phone Duel is a beast designed for gaming, so in addition to the camera positioned on the side and the two shoulder triggers, the phone also integrates two vibration motors for feedback, two speakers that exceed any expectation you could to have from a phone, as well as an RGB lighting solution, which can be controlled from the phone settings.

Last but not least, Lenovo Legion Phone Duel is a big, solid and heavy phone. Because it doesn’t rely on an active cooling solution, Lenovo used two heatpipes, positioned in the center of the phone, two sheets of graphite and a sheet of copper to dissipate the heat released by the chipset. Moreover, the chipset is positioned in the middle of the phone, flanked by the two batteries, which leaves the sides (the areas we actually hold in our hands) significantly colder than the center.