Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “RED Hydrogen One Unboxing! (Houdini Edition)”.
Hey what is up guys, mkbhd here and welcome to an update on the red hydrogen one? This thing is so delayed, it’s silly, but you might remember it from that exclusive reveal video, which was back in august 2017, so about a year ago. The update is a couple weeks ago. They sent out an email asking basically to every pre-order if they wanted to participate in the houdini program, which was basically a sort of a beta testing or prototype testing. Where they’d send you one early and you’d sort of get to bug report and help them build this phone as they go, which is really interesting. I don’t think i’ve seen anything quite like that from a phone in a while, then again, it’s red. This is a camera company that i think right now is discovering slowly how hard it is to build a good smartphone in this really competitive landscape, and i think, generally, their development has been much slower than the competition, but this is it. This is one of the limited edition red hydrogen one houdini edition phones that will be made and shipped to those people who agreed to be a part of it without any further ado.
Let’S go ahead and look in the box, so this is it uh. It comes in this all black uh cardboard unlabeled box, it’s kind of matte black, but not really also excuse the bandage. I don’t think you really want to see the stitches in my finger right now. It’S a long story, but we can get right into it. If we open it at the top of this first box, we get a little card that says inside this box. You’Ll find an unlocked hydrogen 1 limited edition, houdini model plus 128 gig micro sd card and an extended warranty at no charge nice and then that’s this.
So this is a little red and black micro sd card, since the phone has expandable storage and then we have this glass and metal uh. I don’t really know what this is honestly. It says red medium machine, hydrogen. It’S like a medallion, it’s kind of like a souvenir. I guess that maybe you could stick to your desk or a computer or something it’s not really clear what to do with it, but it’s high quality so i’ll keep it around cool anyway, underneath that we get the labeled box with the phone in it, it’s packaged. Actually pretty similar to a lot of other red products, i don’t know if you’ve ever unboxed, a red accessory or even a red camera, or something like that.
You’Ll probably be familiar with these boxes with the magnets and everything it’s high quality. So i’m a fan of that we open this up and we have the phone right up top hydrogen and we’ll go ahead and and get that plastic off in a second. But we also want to see what else is in the box. We do have some paperwork at the top. Is this sort of a quick start guide which shows you how to get the phone up and running getting a sim card in there? And everything like that? Underneath that there’s your important safety information and that warranty and under that there’s actually a red branded power, brick and usb type-c cable. It says on the brick, it’s five volts, three amps, so we’ll cross our fingers for some type of quick charging happening here.
But that’s that so right off the bat. This is like my second impression and yeah. The phone is still big. It’S still so huge.
You can probably tell even in my hands it looks like a massive device. It still has those pins on the back, which is interesting. The ridges, the huge grips up and down the bezels, a lot of cutouts for front-facing sensors. Actually, and it’s just overall a unique looking phone it doesn’t even have it doesn’t have the normal sleek and modern.
Look of all the other glass sandwich, flagships we’ve gotten lately. It just looks kind of like another red camera like a tool or a device, you’d use for a function, and that’s it we’ll go ahead and get it booted. For the first time. With this power button fingerprint reader on the side and this loading animation, this one right here is the first time i’m seeing this holographic effect right off the bat, and it definitely does not pick up on camera. It just looks slanted, but then after it sets up it, it just runs sets up like a normal android phone. I registered my fingerprint signed in with google and everything.
So now i’m really gon na just start digging into this thing and seeing what it’s all about this is day one for me and you already know, i’m gon na be sharing my thoughts on it as we go and you better believe. I’M also gon na be tweeting sample photos from that camera. That’S the main thing i’m into so be sure to be following there, if you’re not already – and we got to start digging through this thing and seeing what it’s all about there is, of course, a lot of concern over how delayed this thing is, naturally, because it Has last year’s specs from when it got announced so for those who forgot snapdragon, 835, six gigs of ram, but also a 4 000 milliamp hour battery and expandable storage? I think a lot of people who pre-ordered this phone, though, aren’t buying it to use as their primary phone. At least i don’t think like. I think it’s got to be a lot of people like me who want this to be an absolutely baller camera experience. First and then also have a great software experience kind of like a phone, you know, but there is a lot happening here, there’s a separate marketplace for apps and games that support the holographic four view: content in addition to the play store.
There is, of course, this red launcher, which you can disable and use the normal android launcher, but that’s definitely worth exploring. Also, there’s also this really interesting camera app with a lot of controls at your fingertips and i’ve been told, they’re still working on the app on the controls. You have the image processing the color science, all of that, but they’re going to use our experience with these prototypes to keep improving it. As we go, the holographic display itself, it doesn’t show up basically at all on camera.
It just kind of looks like normal content. That’S pixelated because of how the tech works, but in person on this near final version, it’s really trippy and it definitely it’s going to be a challenge to shoot stuff and and actually take advantage of the holographic nature of it to make it look good. There’S some demo reels and some things where stuff pops out at the camera, and some of it looks good, but that’s going to be a challenge and there’s even little things. I’M seeing like one of these little cutouts up front is a multi-color notification led, and this exact model here i’m holding, is serial number triple zero.
Eight of the uh 300 prototypes they’re gon na be making. So that’s pretty cool and i’ve also noticed it seems like it’s really easy for dust and stuff to get caught in these little grooves on the back of the phone we’ll see if that holds up and the dual cameras and the flash module on the back. Look exactly like a face and there’s much much more, but definitely let me know what you think about the whole hydrogen one concept one year later. Basically, there’s still a lot, we don’t know, there’s still the exposed pins on the back.
We don’t know what the modules look like, but just the whole idea of like this huge phone. That’S, i guess a camera first and then a phone second and then the rest of the things that connect to it. And let me know what you want to see in a full review for when that comes out either way, thanks for watching catch you in the next one peace .