Say hello to Lenovo's Howard Beale device. Someone in some board room threw up his hands and was mad as hell and announced that the company was just going to go ahead and embrace the phablet phenomenon with a 6.8-inch device.

I'd be quick to dismiss the odd thing, if it weren't for that one IFA not so many years ago when a company called Samsung introduced a giant phone with its own stylus, of all things.

And hey, this phablet pheels pretty phreaking nice. In fact, it's more like something between an iPhone 6 Plus and an iPad Mini. It's got some seriously solid construction, and surprisingly isn't all that difficult to hold in one hand.

Of course, there's the whole question of how ridiculous one looks while holding the thing but, if anything, history tends to be forgiving of enormous screens. You can still make calls via LTE, but Lenovo seems pretty convinced that no one does that anyway.

At the end of the day, the device feels more like an in-between product in search of a niche, rather than something that address actual issues – but hey, we've been wrong before.