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Recently, I've been testing a phone from PC giant Lenovo Group (0992HK), the Phab2 Pro, which went on sale late last year for $499, and which has the distinction of being the first phone with so-called 3-D sensing, which many believe is coming to the next Apple (AAPL) iPhone, the one everyone is starting to refer to as the e iPhone X, because this year is the 10th anniversary of the iPhone.

The Phab2 is available from Lenovo's online store and from various bricks-and-mortar retailers.

The Phab is intriguing, but as many reviewers have pointed out, it falls short. The device is huge and heavy, an uber-phablet, and not what most people would want to carry in a purse or pocket. People I showed it to were aghast at the size and heft of it. I can only imagine that being first to market with 3-D sensing necessitated a larger device to fit all the 3-D sensing components.

Most of the device's features seem fairly comparable to other phones that run Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google's Android software. The real reason, presumably, to consider this device is the 3-D part. The 3-D sensing itself is based on technology developed by Google under the rubric Tango. The phone even carries the Tango mark on its back case.

I found the Phab's 3-D sensing functions flaky. There are some intriguing apps, but they are all hard to use and have a habit of locking up or producing erratic results. Although my proficiency improved, it was clear these apps still needed bug fixes and needed some of their user interface re-conceived to make their functions really sing. I expect things will get better over time as developers refine their control of the Tango code.

3-D sensing uses a laser to shoot beams of infrared light, and then times the return of that light to the phone's photodetector to calculate the distance to the object. It gives the phone a sense of depth, and many applications become possible.

Google itself offers an app called Measure, which lets you project a tape measure along edges of objects. You can use it to get the dimensions of things. It's a brilliant idea and has good potential, but I found locking onto edges of things fairly precarious. It's all just a little too much effort for the result.

I tested an app from online furnishings store Wayfair (W). It lets you project a couch or table or other item on top of the scene in your camera viewfinder. Because of 3-D sensing, the proportions and angles are in accord with the perspective seen through the viewfinder. You can do this to see how stuff would look in your office or apartment.

I used it to see how adding a couch and some other items to my Barron's cubicle might look:

In practice, furniture doesn't always line up correctly, and objects are hard to move around with your finger if you want to change the layout. Also, if you take a picture of the scene, in my experience, your layout resets and all the items of furniture you've been looking at in the course of a session end up in a huge pile in the middle of the scene, which is a major shortcoming that discourages one from using the app.

A fun app called Holo lets one put an animated gorilla, zombie, dog, or other characters on top of the scene viewed through the camera viewfinder. This leads to some hilarious videos, such as this gorilla dancing on a subway platform:

Again, however, controlling placement, rotation, and scale of the dancing gorilla proved challenging. It feels like the developers need to take another crack at the UI for these things.

A very intriguing app is one from Matterport, a startup that has been in the business of selling 3-D cameras. Instead of mounting their $5,000 camera on a tripod, you use the Phab to sweep the room with a steady motion of your hand, and the software gradually constructs a three-dimensional map of the room.

You could create a 3-D floor plan to use for architectural projects, which you can look at from any angle. But it takes a long time to perform this scanning operation. And the results, while fascinating, seem fairly messy. I gave up after losing patience with the whole process.

In the end, a lot of the novelty of all this fades in the face of the frustrations. And the phone runs through its battery extremely quickly during extended sessions of 3-D, which seems surprising given it has a largish 450mAh battery.

The Phab presents some intriguing possibilities. But the technology will have to be considerably refined to appeal to a mass audience. Hopefully, Apple and its developers can make that happen.

The focus of Wall Street is all about what 3-D may mean if it ships in a model of the iPhone X. Bernstein analyst Mark Li on Friday offered up a bit of weekend reading, which is the second white paper I saw last week on the topic. Stifel Nicolaus's had a big white paper on the topic earlier in the week. Li goes through the suppliers in some detail, such as Lumentum Holdings (LITE) and Viavi Solutions (VIAV), for lasers and photodetectors used for the sensing.

Indeed, Lumentum's Q4 report this past week drove the stock up sharply as analysts liked the company's comments about 3-D sensing's potential revenue. (Viavi reports financial results on February 20th.)

The most interesting bit of Li's report is how he ties 3-D sensing into so many applications. Aside from Tango, there is, of course, a form of the technology that showed up years ago in Microsoft's (MSFT) Xbox game console controller device known as Kinect. Apple bought an Israeli company that developed that sensor, PrimeSense, in 2013.

Intel (INTC) has demonstrated public uses of this kind of sensing, first discussing it as "" back in 2014, following up with some more about it during its Developer Forum show in the summer of 2015, and discussing it during CEO Brian Krzanich's keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2015, among other instances.

But you'll also find 3-D sensing in the headsets of Facebook's (FB) Oculus Rift VR system, as well as the HTC's (2498TW) system; you find it in Microsoft's Hololens augmented reality headset; you find it in BMW's 2016 7 series cars, for recognizing a driver's gestures inside the cabin; you find it in drones such as DJI's Phantom 4 Pro; and you find it in robots such as Asustek's (2357TW) "" robot and a robot from Segway.

My column in this week's Barron's print magazine discusses some of the things brought up in this article.

For those who are interested, the following table presents Li's list of supplier names to watch: