Lenovo’s new gaming phone might have just fixed the main issue with livestreaming from your phone

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If you livestream games from your mobile phone, you know the pain of having to stretch your hand to weird positions so you don’t cover up your selfie camera while controlling your gameplay. That looks to change, with Lenovo’s first gaming-focused smartphone bringing a new position for that selfie cam – a 20-megapixel pop-up camera in the middle of the phone’s side.

The Lenovo Legion Phone Duel is no slouch in other respects either, with the powerful Snapdragon 865 Plus chipset, up to 12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage. That’ll all add up to some blisteringly fast gameplay, and it’s also 5G-ready with the sub-6GHz spectrum.

That camera placement is possible as Lenovo redesigned how most smartphones are arranged inside, with dual batteries on either side of the central portion. Lenovo also put dual-vibration motors in, so it will feel more like the force-feedback controllers you are used to using on your consoles.

Image: Lenovo

Those dual-batteries need a lot of charging, as they are 2,500mAh each. Lenovo solves this by putting two USB-C ports on the phone, one on the short edge like every other phone, and one on the long side opposite the selfie-cam, just like on the Nintendo Switch. Plugging in two cables recharges both batteries in just 30 minutes, which is pretty amazing.

There are also ultrasonic touch-sensitive sensors on the edge of the phone, so you can map controls to where your fingers would naturally fall while gripping the phone in landscape mode.

Could this finally be the mobile phone that takes on Nintendo’s dominance in the mobile/portable gaming space? Well… hold your judgment on this, as Lenovo doesn’t plan on selling this phone in the USA at all. China will get it in July, then some areas of Asia, Latin America and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. What gives Lenovo?

What do you think? Would you like to see this phone come to the US? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.