Smartphone camera performance has made huge leaps and bounds since its early days, and much more than simply taking higher-resolution pics than in years past, today’s phones deliver images with more accurate colors, lower noise, and support for fancy focus tricks. While the lion’s share of those improvements are due to better hardware in our phones themselves, other benefits have come from external accessories: everything from pop-on lens extensions to full-on external cameras. This year at CES we saw Lenovo introduce something a bit different from what many manufacturers are doing, announcing an add-on LED selfie flash for one of its new Androids. We tracked it down to take a look for ourselves.
The Vibe Xtension Selfie Flash plugs into the Vibe X2 Pro’s headphone jack, where its eight diffused LEDs provide a bright light source for taking shots with the phone’s front-facer (unlike the selfie-focused HTC Desire Eye, the X2 Pro has no front-facing flash of its own).
The flash has its own internal battery, is small enough to fit in a pocket when not in use, and should be bright enough for capturing a quality shot even in the dimmest of environments. Watch below to see this guy in action.