Lenovo’s Z5 Pro GT Could Be the First Snapdragon 855 Phone

The smartphone spec race isn’t as hot as it once was with almost every flagship phone sporting the same chips and features. However, some markets are much more focused on the speeds and feeds than others. Case in point: Lenovo has been on a tear lately, launching ultra-high-end smartphones in the Chinese market where consumers demand all the RAM and storage possible. The latest Lenovo Z5 Pro GT will deliver with a record 12GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 855.

This phone is very similar to the Z5 Pro Lenovo showed off a few months ago, but it’s got all the latest hardware and features. Visually, the biggest difference is the red accent that runs down the back and around the camera lenses. The price, meanwhile, is surprisingly reasonable. While this is an Android phone, it won’t have any Google services because it’s for China.

The Z5 Pro GT is a slider, a design that has come back into style with the trend toward all-screen devices. Rather than have a notch cut-out, the Z5 Pro GT screen slides down to reveal a section of the frame with front-facing cameras. There’s a standard 16MP shooter and an 8MP infrared camera for face unlock. Presumably, that means it shouldn’t be defeated by a 3D printed head. At least we can hope.

The slider leaves all of the front available for the 6.39-inch 2340 x 1080 OLED screen. There’s almost no bezel around the top and sides of the display, but there’s a slightly larger lip around the bottom. This is common on phones because the display drivers need to fit someplace. Apple avoids this by bending the OLED panel back at the bottom, but that’s expensive and hard to do.

Inside, this phone will have up to 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. It may also be the first place to get the just-announced Snapdragon 855. The 855 has eight CPU cores, with various frequencies. The high-power CPUs are split into 2.84Ghz and 2.42GHz (3x), and the efficiency cores are all clocked at 1.8GHz. It’s also the first commercially available 7nm system-on-a-chip. The 855 supports optional 5G via an interlinked X50 5G radio, but the Lenovo phone won’t have that. It will just be an LTE phone as 5G is not available in China yet.

Lenovo will begin taking pre-orders for the Z5 Pro GT on Jan. 15, and it’ll launch on Jan. 24. The least expensive version of the phone has “only” 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage for 2,698 yuan ($390). The top-of-the-line version with 12GB RAM and 512GB of storage is 4,398 yuan ($640).

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