Dope Tech Fever

  When early adopters of curved smartphone displays, like Samsung, are moving back to a more traditional 2.5D flattened screen design, other players like Oppo and Xiaomi seem to have taken a keen interest in it.   Oppo had revealed their extremely curved waterfall display a couple of months ago, and now, Xiaomi has decided to take it up a notch, with a four-sided curved screen phone concept! They're calling this a Quad-Curved Waterfall Display; a rather lazy and lengthy name. But the showcase video seems pretty far from a cheesy CG render.     The phone in question doesn't have a name yet, but the display tech is very much a manufacturable reality. Xiaomi has also written a detailed article on their blog describing the complex methods employed in making such an extreme curved edge, and their vision of this button-less, port-less phone being the future,   "Unibody no-port design, a new direction for future smartphones"   Xiaomi firmly believes that Apple's ea

Samsung Galaxy Note 9 was an amazing smartphone back in 2018. It improved upon pretty much everything that the cautiously launched Note 8 lacked; A bigger battery, way better (stereo) speakers, Better performance, and of course, improved cameras. I am one of the many users who still own and swear by their Note 9 even as we start marching through 2021. That made me wonder, perhaps a revisit or re-review of sorts is an order for my trusty Note, 2 something years after its launch.    Should you buy an older flagship in 2021? let's take a look at how the Note 9 has aged.   The physical build is probably the least affected one here. The metal frame has a few scratches and so does the display; general wear and tear of sorts. Nothing out of the ordinary to report.   The beautiful 1440p QHD+ AMOLED Display, despite physically being at "only" 60 Hz, due to faster animations on Sammy's new One UI 2.5 software skin, feel like almost 90 Hz.      The new UI also brings

We've seen folding phones already from Samsung and Huawei. The former of which has already launched its product into the mainstream consumer market, though it's strictly placed in the ultra-premium segment at the moment. But if you thought that folding a screen inwards or outwards is the only real way to pack a bigger display into a smaller screen, you'd be wrong. There are working phone models from the likes of Oppo and now, TCL, that has a Rolling display tech built into their devices!    You've probably already heard or seen the former from Oppo. It's called the Oppo X 2021 .    Unveiled in late 2020, the phone has a seemingly normal 6.7-inch OLED display which rolls open into a 7.4-inch tablet form factor at the touch of a capacitive side button. Watch this video for more details:     The phone has motorized pulleys on the underside of the left corners that slowly pushes the display outwards, or retract it in while rolling it like you would a sheet of paper. It&

  Oppo is known for its bold designs and crazy ideas for smartphones. They brought along the rotating cameras with their N-series back in 2013, the rising camera visor on the Find X in 2019, the Rolling motorized display phone in 2020 to name a few. They have now partnered up with Nendo ; a well-known architectural design studio to create a bizarre phone concept with 5 screens and 4 folding hinges !     If you thought the galaxy Z2 Fold was a delicate thingy, well this one-ups that in pretty much every way. there are four places where this would structurally fail. But it's not made yet, just a concept at this point. So let's look at it from the same perspective.     The Phone is simply called the "Slide" phone, because it has so manuy folds, you have to slide the screens on top of one another to open it.      "The phone in its folded state is 54 mm by 86 mm, the size of a credit card, featuring three hinges folding over in the same direction. Like an inchwor