If you've been keeping up with smartphone news, you probably know that rollable smartphones are the next big thing, stealing the rumble from foldable phones, if you will. These devices allow you to expand the size of the screen, since part of the screen is rolled up in the body of the phone and can be unwrapped whenever you want. It's a futuristic concept and no commercially available smartphone has done it yet, though we've seen Oppo, TCL and LG show off their versions. I got acquainted with the Oppo X 2021, Oppo's rollable smartphone, to see what that form factor is and how much fun it is to implement such a phone. At the moment, this is just a concept device designed to test rolling parts, so its cameras, battery life, and internals weren't the focus, but I was able to test extending and retracting the device over and over again. Lors du test du smartphone roulant Oppo X 2021, quelques observaciones m'ont frappé à propos du téléphone et du facteur de forme en général, et vous pouvez les lire ci-dessous - ainsi que de nombreuses vidéos de la chose qui roule et se déroule , clear.
What I like
The absence of a screen peak.
When using a foldable smartphone, there is always a ridge in the middle of the screen; that's where the screen folds down and there are usually some mechanics that can't really be hidden. It's a boring but necessary part of the folding experience, no matter how hard manufacturers try to hide it. Due to the nature of the beast, there is no such crease on the Oppo X 2021 – you can swipe your finger across the entire screen without finding a bulge, line or mark. I also found there was no risk of the phone breaking in half if I pushed too hard, which I certainly can't say about Samsung's foldable devices. I found myself preferring the screen of the Oppo X 2021 to those of the foldables I tested thanks to these two factors, which is possibly the goal of the foldables. The Oppo X 2021's display isn't glass, but according to Oppo that will likely change for future products, but the company adds that it "needs to improve in terms of texture and reliability" before then, that won't happen.
Its easy size with one hand
With its rolled screen, the Oppo X 2021, with a 6.7-inch display, is practically one-handed, bigger and safer than a two-handed device would be. I quickly liked this size as it allowed for fairly easy navigation when the phone was rolled up. However, the phone stays in one hand when the screen is expanded, since the screen only moves to the side, you don't even have to move your digits as the screen scrolls. The location of the scroll button helps with this, but as I'll get to later, the button isn't perfect. It's also helpful that the phone's center of mass doesn't move too much when unrolling it; when you unfold a folding, the center of mass moves to the middle, but for the 2021 X it seemed to stay roughly on the I'' side. had been pending. This made it even easier to continue using the phone with one hand when it was unfolded.
The process is transparent
Until I used the Oppo X 2021, the process of opening a foldable phone didn't really bother me, just open it like a book or an old foldable phone, and it doesn't take much time and effort. It takes more effort than using a roll-up phone, though, as I quickly found out: Thanks to how the form factor works, the built-in mechanisms open the phone up so you can sit back and look at the phone's screen. dilate. Sure, it may seem like a lazy person's delight, but I can also see it being useful in other contexts as well: maybe you're on a noisy subway train, connecting to a rail, and now you don't have to take that. Hand over the rail to unfold your phone and risk a small bump catapulting it into the nearest person. Also, did that content stay on screen and scale well enough? When I was reading a TechRadar article, for example (because why would you read anything else?), L The element stayed on the screen while the scrollable segment moved, and then changed seamlessly. to fill the entire screen as needed. With 'book-style' foldables (think the Galaxy Z Fold series), I've found that there can sometimes be a lag when you're looking at an app on the outer screen and then switching to the app. Main (and this doesn't include the time to actually open the thing). It is much more convenient this way.
Oppo air charge
It's something I haven't been able to test, but it's such an interesting idea that I thought I should mention it anyway. As it was unveiled at Mobile World Congress Shanghai, the Oppo X 2021 supports the company's new FreeVOOC air charging: it's like wireless charging, but you don't need to place your phone directly on the charger, with a charging speed of 7.5 W if the device is within 10 meters of the charger. This means that you can put a charger under your sofa and every time you sit on the sofa, your phone will power up. Perfect! Hopefully, we'll see this type of technology used in other phones from the brand, and we already know that Xiaomi and Motorola are working on similar concepts.
I do not like
The complicated way to make it stretch
The Oppo X 2021 expands or retracts in two ways, both using a side power button (which isn't a fingerprint sensor, despite visual similarities). You can slide the button up to extend the phone and down to retract it, or you can double-tap this button for both tasks. I found the button incredibly tricky to slide. Gestures weren't always picked up, and at times I found myself desperately stroking the sensor in a way I normally reserve for cats, in an attempt to get it to work. The double-tap gesture worked more reliably, but the motion wasn't as convenient as swiping: when the screen is extended, you don't have a good grip on it, making it risky to double-tap. Times in case I hit her too. hard and drop it. I would have preferred a different method of extending and retracting the screen. A software option sounds like a good whoop, so you can swipe down for quick settings and hit an ``extend'' button, but I can also see the downsides of convenience. Perhaps a physical slider will work as well, although if (for whatever reason) you choose to close the screen instead of using the slider, you'll end up with the switch in the wrong position.
It doesn't get much bigger
Bigger screens have some advantages: you have more room to watch movies, dual-screen apps, etc. - but the 2021 Oppo X's jump from 6.7-inches to 7.4-inches didn't really seem like enough to justify the form factor. At this size, you didn't feel like you could get two apps side by side for split filtering while still getting enough space, and watching videos isn't much different when the screen is spread out, as aspect ratio is the main thing to change. , so it just creates more mailboxes. I can see that the game is much better with the larger screen size, although this is something I couldn't test on the phone, and the photography was also a little better since I was able to see more 'options on the screen right away. In general, though, I'd like to see a bigger change to the rolled-up size, either a screen that stretches out more (which may or may not be possible, I'm not an engineer after all), or a device that's smaller. , so an extension makes it look bigger by comparison.