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Tango, if you don't remember, is Google's augmented reality platform, born out of the company's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group. Tango takes a smartphone and crams it full of extra cameras and an IR projector for full 3D vision and six-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) tracking. There's a Tango store with apps specifically made for the hardware, but, with limited hardware and (we'd imagine) even more limited sales, there's not a lot there to pick from.

The first Tango phone was the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro , on which we did a full review. The 6.4-inch monstrosity left a lot to be desired in the design department, with massive bezels that made the device a whopping 180mm high—closer to the height of an iPad mini than an actual phone. It was also really slow—the Snapdragon 652 and 4GB of RAM weren't nearly up to the task of running the extremely power-hungry Tango apps.

The ZenPhone is still a big device—it's a 5.7-inch device with almost double-height bezels—but the 158mm height is a bit more appropriate for the realm of smartphones. The ZenPhone is also a lot faster, with a Snapdragon 821—although the 82x platform is something like 16 months old at this point. It seems both Tango phones have been plagued with long development times. The device comes with 6 or 8GB of RAM, which Tango apps will absolutely make use of—on the 4GB Phab 2 Pro, we ran into numerous "out of memory" errors.

The Tango platform doesn't seem to have moved much since we last looked at it. Verizon's promo video shows the same boring apps we tried last year, and early hands-on reports still complain of crashing and general jankiness. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Apple is getting ready to roll out ARKit—an augmented reality framework that requires no extra hardware—to millions of iPhones with iOS 11. While we've only seen ARKit in videos, it looks to have more stable AR tracking than Tango, which has a lot of drift.

While the Tango phone platform doesn't seem to be going very far right now, the technology will live on at Google through the company's VR efforts. The Daydream group's "WorldSense" tracking will co-opt the tech for 6DoF tracking in a standalone headset, to be released later this year.