Exploring the world of immersion with the Lenovo Vibe X3

This post is brought to you by the Lenovo Vibe X3 – A cinematic experience in the palm of your hand.

Any manufacturer can cram high-end specs into a smartphone and call it a flagship device. Of course, a flagship device must have a smooth performance and good specifications, but we’ve come to a point where performance alone isn’t really enough to set you apart from the pack of existing devices.

A flagship device needs to unique, one of a kind…somewhat special.

Lenovo’s flagship, the Vibe X3, is an interesting device. Although its specs in terms of hardware and camera optics may be rather similar to the other flagship devices in the market, the handset does have something rather special up its sleeve.

Trying their hand at the immersive world of virtual reality, Lenovo set out to make the Vibe X3 unique and what they came up with was TheaterMax — Lenovo’s stab at giving you the most immersive smartphone viewing experience of any device.

In a nutshell, TheaterMax converts everything on your smartphone’s display into content viewable in a VR headset. It duplicates the screen — much like YouTube’s VR video content — so that when both images are combined with a VR headset, like the RM99 ANTVR headset for example, it transforms into what looks like a 60-inch television screen mounted inches from your face. It’s magnificent.

When watching videos, you get the sense that you’re incredibly close to the action, something you don’t really get with other smartphones or even tablets. Pair that with the Vibe X3’s excellent front-facing Dolby Atmos stereo speakers and you’re in for one amazing ride. It’s a mish-mash of native software enhancements in the Vibe X3 plus the hardware lenses of a virtual reality headset that allows this device to to do what it does.

True, it may not be the ultimate exercise in a virtual reality experience, but there’s no denying the level of immersion this smartphone affords. The unique thing is that basically everything you do daily — watching youtube videos, using the camera app — becomes incredibly immersive.

This opens up a bunch of interesting ways to use the smartphone features, one of the ones we did was record a first person video with the camera app in VR mode strapped to our face. That way, the camera could literally record everything we set our eyes one.

TheaterMax is merely one of Lenovo’s innovations, if you’re not into that there is already an entire world of VR content ready and waiting for you to give it a shot. Some of our personal favourites include Hardcode, Germbuster and InCell. If you’re willing to pony up a little bit, some other awesome titles like End Space and Bandit Six put you in the pilot’s seat for some dope flying and air-to-air combat.

That said, TheaterMax is something rather new and special and that’s pretty rare in a smartphone world populated by what are essentially the same device with a different brand or built out of slightly different materials. It isn’t easy to distinguish yourself from the current crop of powerful flagship smartphones, but the Lenovo Vibe X3 does it and that’s all down to TheaterMax and the experience it provides.