Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “”Smartphones are Boring now.””.
Smartphones are boring now, smartphones aren’t innovating anymore, smartphones used to be fun, but now they’re, not smartphones. All look. The same smartphones are done. The end of smartphones has arrived, you’ll have seen at least one headline that looks something like this. I think they’re all wrong. I think there’s very good reason to be excited about smartphones right now.
I’M gon na give you nine of them, so foldable phones are pretty cool right. In the last two years, we’ve had everything from flip phones to book, phones to triple folding, rubik’s, cube phones, but even though all this is still so recent, i think we’ve already just done one better with rollable smartphones. Last week, oppo announced the x the phone with a flexible oled display that with one tap can roll up inside itself, and when i saw this, i was like that’s incredible, but it’s only as i started to think about it more that.
I realized it’s better, because this concept solves almost every problem we’ve had with foldables. For starters, it means that when it’s folded up, you can still have something that feels like a normal phone instead of the double layered tv remote. Like experience, we have now because there’s no folding involved, you don’t get the crease. That’S plagued every foldable phone to date, plus because you’re not switching between two different screens with different specs.
You can have the same display quality, whichever mode you’re in and the fact that you only need to build. One display here compared to two on most foldables, means that when this mechanism hits mass production, i think it’ll be not just slimmer and lighter, but also cheaper, to produce okay, here’s something else so the other day i was just scrolling through twitter – and i came across This xiaomi is working on a retractable camera and i remember thinking oh cool and then just kind of carried on scrolling, but it was only later that night that i realized wait. A second that’s game changing. So almost every smartphone now has multiple camera lenses, a main camera to shoot normal shots, an ultrawide camera to shoot well, ultra wide shots and a telephoto camera to get right up close to your subject. But i’ve been thinking this for a while. Now this whole concept of having three different cameras is actually a bit of a hack.
It’S not an ideal solution, because one, instead of just building one incredible camera on the back companies having to split their resources and budget across three cameras now, and so none of them can actually be as good as they could have been two. What ends up happening is that they spend most of their now already limited budget on the primary camera, and then they leave the ultra ride and zoom as afterthoughts they’re, noticeably less good. And you feel it as you swap between them and three that for a lot of photos, you have to use digital zoom, because while we do have three different cameras at three different magnifications, these are at fixed focal lengths, meaning that you’re only getting a full quality Shot specifically at those three points and for anything between them, your camera has to use software to kind of compensate and that’s not as pretty so long story short.
If and i almost want to say when this concept matures and hits consumer-ready devices it can solve. All of those problems, just one incredible camera that can be wide or zoomed, and everything in between how do you feel about bezels the the borders around your screen? I know that some of you literally couldn’t care less, but the one thing that’s always bugged me is the asymmetry that we’ve had on phone so far like for the last four years, or so. We’Ve seen company after company announce edgeless phone after edgeless phone or with increasingly convoluted names to describe how edgeless they are. But up until this point, the one edge they’ve not managed to conquer is the bottom edge.
The chin see. The issue is that your phone’s display needs to connect to the phone’s main circuit board and the cable that does that connecting sits right here. The only company that managed to solve this before 2020 was actually apple with the iphone 10..
What they did is actually curve. The display back over itself so that the connector that sits at the end of it is no longer taking up room right at the bottom. Here the display is almost looped back over itself, so we can attach almost directly to the circuit board. That’S it while apple did solve the bottom bezel problem, the top bezel is still uh lacking in the aesthetic department. So what i’m excited about here is the android makers are finally following suit, starting next year, we’re about to get the bar phones that we dreamed of 15 years ago, google’s already started using a similar screen, bending tech with their pixel 5.
But it’s looking like samsung is about to take it to a whole other level with the galaxy s21 edgeless, but from every angle this time this whole even bezel thing. It does sound like a really subtle point, but i think when you see it and you hold it, it will be tough to go back and the final step towards this kind of perfect seamless bar phone is also happening as we speak, invisible front cameras so the Way this works is you have a normal looking phone display, but actually a small part of that display right at the top is transparent and your front camera sits right behind it. It’S a bit of a double edged blade.
The fact that this is still display in front of the camera means that when it’s lit up, you can’t see the lens behind it. But then, when you switch to the camera, the transparent portion of the screen switches off and it becomes like a sheet of glass – and actually this is the clever part – that sheet of glass also doubles as a lens for that camera. I guess the coolest part of this is that last time i was talking about this tech. It was still one of those theoretical concepts that wasn’t quite baked, but you can actually buy a phone that has an invisible front. Camera and the tech is only about to get better. You know one of the other technologies. That’S silently evolving really quickly is electrochromic glass, it’s glass that might look like one thing, but pass a current through it and you can change the molecular arrangement to make it look like something quite different, so we saw the first example of this with the oneplus concept. One smartphone, which had this small window that could tint itself black okay cool, but all of a sudden out of nowhere, vivo just came out. Like ha, that’s cute! Look what we’ve done with the tech! They built a smartphone whose entire back panel can colour shift on command.
I’M not talking about a phone that looks different in different kinds of lighting conditions. This is full-on just changing the chemical properties of the glass, and at this rate it probably won’t be long before someone drops a consumer-ready phone that can reprogram the way it looks. I’M excited about gaming on smartphones and yes, smartphone gaming has a very mixed reputation.
Yes, there are plenty of games that basically use in-app purchases to suck the life out of your wallet, but at the same time, there’s a fundamental reason why i think smartphone games are about to level up, and it’s not just in terms of graphics, although i think Those are about to leap forward too, like you’ve heard about samsung’s exynos chipsets right, the ones that well, they kind of suck right now, but the first board a couple of years and samsung is going to start letting amd build. Its graphics calls – and i think, there’s a very good chance that either at this point, or even before it a lot of those cool technologies that we’re seeing on the also amd based new gen consoles, like real-time ray tracing, will also make it to phones. But there’s also the more central movement of smartphones becoming more and more of a lucrative gaming platform for developers see with a traditional gaming console you’ve got a user base that steadily grows for the console’s lifecycle like seven years or so, but then it has to keep Starting again from scratch, when the next console comes out with mobile every year, i mean forget that every day the user base is going up without fail. This isn’t a perfect measure, but just for some context, with the playstation 5 we’ve got right now.
Less than 3.5 million users with mobile we’ve got over 3.5 billion, or in other words, if you represented every playstation, 5 user, all together as one chess piece, then smartphone users would be 31 fully set up chess boards, and so it’s getting harder and harder for even Big budget, serious game developers to avoid phones and as this smartphone user base just keeps flying while the console user base is just cycling up and down, i think phones are going to become less of an afterthought and more of a focus for them. And if you do want to see like a full video on that, a sub to the channel would be well definitely not boring. So, for example, you might have heard of the pathless. It’S actually a very solid 40 launch title for the playstation 5. or, alternatively, you can just play the same game for free on your iphone. If you have apple arcade, so yeah we’re going to see more and more of this, as phones become a more profitable and be more powerful. Now, just before the coolest thing that i’ve been looking forward to the most a couple of really weird ones. So you might not have seen this one, it was pretty low key, but back in october, vivo showed the world a pop-up camera system.
That’S detachable so you’ve seen pop-up camera systems like this before, but with vivos you can grab the camera, take it off and carry on using it yeah now, on one hand, i don’t think vivo needs much of a reason to build crazy stuff. Like this, it looks like they kind of enjoy it, but there is some merit here like, for example, you could film something from two different angles. At the same time, you could have your rear camera facing that way, and then you can grab your front camera plop. It down here for that second shot, so you can clip this on to your pet and see what they get up to in a day. Vivo is saying that you can operate this camera completely independently of the phone just using voice commands. It’S very weird, i’m not convinced by it, but is it boring no and something else i saw which kind of tickled a similar nerve is that xiaomi has started, registering patents for a phone with built-in earphones, which does sound a bit like one of those products that Gets announced once no one buys it, and then you never hear about it again, but it kind of makes a lot of sense if you think about it, because chances are that your smartphone and your earphones are two products that you use together, anyways and so having Them built around each other could mean things like never having to worry about pairing again or even actually charging.
If the earphones are built into the phone, you just need to worry about charging the phone that’ll do the rest for you. It means you would always have your earphones with you. You literally can’t forget them, and it would probably also be a bit easier to not lose them, because now you’ve just got one thing to look after and who knows maybe building a pair of earphones around a specific smartphone might well mean better integration. You might be able to control the phone remotely using those earphones.
I’Ve got no idea if it would actually be successful, but i would like to see it just once on a proper high-end smartphone, just because i think it’d be really cool. Okay, but out of all of these things that are happening right now, the one thing i keep going back to is what’s happening with batteries. You’Ve probably heard about graphene it’s this ultra thin layer of carbon atoms, and ever since we started working on it in 2004, we’re realizing more and more that graphene is a miracle material. It’S lighter than aluminium it’s harder than diamond, yet more elastic than rubber graphene is so strong that just one atomic layer of it is enough to absorb the kind of impact that would bend the block of steel and two layers is enough to stop a bullet. It’S got nothing to do with smartphones.
I just thought it was a fun fact. The importance of graphene for smartphones is that it’s also the best known conductor of both electricity and heat on the planet, both very good things to have in a battery. So there’s two stages to the integration of graphene in smartphones.
The first is happening right now, the hybrid stage like we actually have a real phone here, the xiaomi mi 10 ultra, which has a normal lithium battery, but also a sliver of superconductive graphene. Just to get current in and out that battery fast, while staying cool, so you can charge these batteries very quickly, while giving off less heat and therefore less damage to the battery structure. So, while a normal battery unassisted by graphene might lose, let’s say 25 of its total battery capacity over three years, the introduction of just a tiny sliver of graphene could slow that reduction to 10, maybe even 5, but the second stage once graphene becomes affordable. Enough is actually building the entire cell out of graphene and that’s where it gets really interesting, because per kilogram graphene can store over five times the amount of energy.
So it gives companies a choice. They can either keep current levels of endurance, like phones, that last one to two days, but with a battery of fifth of the size, or they could just start pumping out devices that last a week on a charge. Anyways. The point of this entire video is really just to say.
I think it’s easy to look at the past through rose tinted, glasses to say, oh phones were really fun back then now they’re all the same. But, to be really honest, i don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be picking one plus, while yes going into a phone store 20 years ago, you might well have seen more variety in terms of the shapes of devices, but after that, once you’ve Picked one up and brought it home that was about where the fun ended now, with what smartphones can do and will be able to do, that’s where the fun begins. Okay, i hope you enjoyed this video do consider subscribing if you did, my name is aaron. This is the boss and i’ll catch you in the next. You .