Lenovo has been in the gaming smartphone scene for some time now, with the Legion Phone Duel and Legion Phone Duel 2 offering strong hardware for gamers on the go. With their latest installment in the Legion gaming phone series though, they’ve switched it up by calling their new flagship gaming phone the Lenovo Legion Y90, likely to follow the Y-series nomenclature of their gaming laptops.
Lenovo Legion Y90 specs
At first glance, the Legion Y90 doesn’t look too far from the Legion Phone Duel 2, with a central camera bump and a large display. The display itself is a huge 6.92-inch, FHD+ AMOLED display with a peak brightness of 1,300nits. Of course, it is also capable of a speedy 144Hz refresh rate and has a 720Hz touch sampling rate, on top of a response time of 3.4ms too. Beyond just gaming, it’ll likely be a solid choice for streaming content thanks to the HDR10+ support as well as a deltaE < 0.6 colour reproduction.
Under the hood, the Legion Y90 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, mated to up to 18GB of RAM and—get this—up to a total of 640GB. The unusual storage spec is thanks to Lenovo mating 512GB of UFS 3.1 with 128GB of SSD storage in a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 essentially means that the two drives have been striped together and can lead to increased performance, but has the drawback of an lower reliability, as if one drive fails all drives will lose their data. It comes with Android 12 out of the box with Lenovo’s ZUI 13 skin. There’s also dual fans to ensure the silicon keeps cool during long gaming sessions.
As with most gaming phones out there, the cameras typically aren’t a major focus of the device and it shows with the Legion Y90. You’re only getting a dual rear camera setup on the central hump, with a 64MP main shooter paired with a 13MP ultra wide lens. The rear camera bump also has the Lenovo Legion logo, which importantly has RGB lighting too. As for the front camera, it no longer has a pop up selfie camera in the middle, with Lenovo instead opting for a more traditional 16MP selfie camera housed in the upper bezel of the display.
Other features of note include shoulder keys and increased pressure sensitive zones on the sides of the display for “six-key” controls. There’s a pretty large 5,600mAh battery that they say will last you up to 8 hours of gaming or 13 hours of streaming, with 68W fast charging. Just like the Legion Phone Duel 2, there’s two USB-C ports with one on the bottom and one on the side for even more power. It has support for 5G, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, while the fingerprint sensor is located under the display. No 3.5mm audio jack though, but there are stereo speakers at least.
The Lenovo Legion Y90 isn’t available outside of China just yet unfortunately. Its base model comes in at CNY4,299 (~RM2,857.58) for 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, while the mid-specced model with 16GB and 256GB of storage is going for CNY4,599 (~RM3,056.96). As for the top end model with 18GB of RAM and its 640GB of storage, it retails for CNY5,299 (~RM3,522.34). In comparison, the older Asus ROG Phone 5s debuted last year in China starting at CNY3,999 though that only gets you 8GB of RAM. Incidentally, Lenovo are running an early bird promotion in China that does drop the base model price to CNY3,999.
There’s no word yet if Lenovo plans to bring the Legion Y90 beyond China either; the Legion Phone Duel 2 was officially announced for Malaysia last year but actually trying to buy one was a lot harder than expected. If they do bring it here though for a competitive price, it will likely go head-to-head against the popular ROG Phone lineup.
