Lenovo Legion Play: a new competitor for the Nintendo Switch and the Steam Deck

If we are to believe a new, fairly precise leak, Lenovo would be the next to embark on the race for ultraportable game consoles.

The success of the Nintendo Switch always creates more emulators. After the Valve Steam Deck, it is Lenovo which seems to be preparing a competing device under the name Lenovo Legion Play. These images were found by members of the GBA Temp forums and pointed to the name of the product on the Lenovo site. The Liliputing site was able to find their sources directly on Lenovo sites dedicated to MWC 2021. The product should therefore have already been presented by the brand at the Barcelona show at the beginning of the year.

An Android console

The Nintendo Switch is a full-fledged console with its own games and its own system, the Steam Deck runs under a particular GNU / Linux distribution and wants to run Windows games. For its part, Lenovo has opted for the third solution: an Android product.

The interface presented by Lenovo’s images barely masks the inspiration. It’s hard not to see a copy of the Nintendo Switch interface with this central line of shortcuts. Obviously, the product did not seem ready for marketing yet, the example games are only placeholders with “set 1”, “set 2”, etc. However, we note the presence of GeForce Now, Nvidia’s cloud gaming service. This is undoubtedly one of the strengths of this kind of device. Google applications also seem to be in the game.

The status bar at the top of the screen suggests that the product would offer 4G mobile network compatibility in addition to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. We can indeed see a mobile antenna signal between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

No characteristics have filtered concerning the potency of the product. Liliputing only tells us that Legion Play would offer a 7-inch screen with HDR10 certification, which doesn’t mean much. The battery is said to be 7000 mAh and the controllers do not appear to be removable.

A bad concept?

It’s hard to know what happened to the project and why Lenovo never announced this product. The brand may have realized the difficulty of launching a game console without really making it its business. Recall that the Nintendo Switch owes its success above all to the quality of the games offered by Nintendo and the brand’s ability to create a machine that is unique on the market. A simple copy on Android would not really keep the race going.

Above all, starting with an Android-based machine, with one can imagine a MediaTek or Qualcomm SoC, it is hard to imagine how this Lenovo Legion Play could compete with… a simple smartphone equipped with a controller. The games will be the same and the performances very close.