our ces 2019 coverage is brought to you by dbrand the dbrand grip and their
prism screen protector are a great way to keep your phone from getting damaged
in the event of an accidental drop or
here's another idea this right here is the royal flex pie
the world's first commercially available phone with a flexible amoled display now
i'm sure you guys have a lot of questions and so did i but the good news
is i have actually gotten the answers for most of them so stay tuned because
there are some things about this that are really cool and there are some things about this that are a little bit
less cool so they started out in 2012 but this is actually their first phone
they've been hard at work on this for years and they actually had to build
their own fabrication and production line in order to make this a reality and
it started with the world's thinnest display so they claim that the actual
display layer of their tech here is just point .01 millimeters thick and this was
absolutely critical to getting it to be flexible enough that it could not just
be bent in a tight radius like this but
it could do so 200 000 times without
being damaged the trick here is that while flexible OLED technology has been
around for a long time the substrate is the part that's the challenge because
traditionally you would build it onto glass and finding a plastic that is also
both thin and flexible and durable both
whatever don't worry about it enough is a real challenge now they couldn't
really give me any details as to exactly what plastic they're using but it seems
to be working incredibly well now in terms of the operating system and specs
it's running snapdragon 855 six or eight gigs of RAM 128 or 256 gigs of storage
and a customized version of Android that
they're calling water os and the reason for that is that they had to specially
design the software in order to flow like water from one orientation to
another so you can use it like this in tablet mode so that's uh either portrait
or landscape mode that is a 4x3 display if you're into the mobile productivity
you can fold it up and use it like this and you're going to end up with a 16x9
display you can turn it around and here you've got i believe it's an 18 by nine
display if you use it in this aspect ratio and what's cool is that you can
either turn off the rear display in what they call uh mid brightness mode i think
medium brightness mode or you can keep it enabled just for that like you know
super casual hey you know no big deal but this is just the future in my hand
kind of thing you know don't stress out about it's all good they've also got an
edge display as you can clearly see here man that looks so cool and there's a
bunch of functionality that you can set up in order to uh click on it there we
go so i customized mine to have a camera icon there the camera is also pretty
crazy so there's two cameras they're both right there which means if you want
to take a selfie you go ahead and hit that selfie button boom switch to a
secondary screen it uses uh it seems to use accelerometers and gyroscopes or
whatever like traditional orientation mechanisms in order to tell which screen
you're looking at so sometimes it's a little bit off but there you go i'm in selfie mode
or boom you want to switch back you go there's still a little bit of placeholder chinese in the os look
they're not planning to launch this in the u.s like anytime soon like hopefully
sometime this year they said but they're already actually launched in china
and then this is pretty cool you can go into whoops
there we go dual mode and then both the user and the subject can actually
see like preview the picture that you're taking
i know right however
there are definitely some things i noticed while content consumption is
actually i would consider to be a strong point for a design like this where
you've got stereo speakers i'm going to go like that stereo
speakers if you're in tablet mode or
you're going to have to switch to well effectively i mean they could still be
pumping stereo sound but you'd only really get a mono effect out of them
speakers in folded mode the screen
is a bit of a weak point so one of the first things i noticed about it when i
walked up was that on the lock screen you can clearly see what appear to be
some kinds of like striations through the display and now initially what i
thought was that this was because of the
fold here either the screen had been worn out by being folded and unfolded a
thousand times on the show floor or it was the slightly ribbed texture behind
it that was causing it to appear that way upon further inspection though what
i realized was that they're present everywhere so you can see under this
file management and clock icon there's kind of a shadow that even moves around
as i swipe the icons to the left and right now then i thought maybe this is
some kind of a shadow that they've baked into their os as a graphical feature
then though i switched it here and it appears as though they still run this
way so there was something else what was the other thing that i was yeah i was using
the play store as an example here so you can see those shadows are still down
here so it appears to be an artifact of the display technology itself at least
at this time another thing that was quite noticeable to me was if we fire up
the messaging app we've actually got i mean i guess this is great for a show
floor demo because you've kind of got a watermark on every screen but they
clearly had demo video running on this for quite some time and we all know that
burn-in can be an issue with amoled technology and it appears that the the
state that they're in right now is one where burn-in is not just possible but
even present on these show floor devices so
state of things now this
is really cool especially how impressively tight
they've got the bend on this thing and now that i'm aware that the issue with
the striations through the display is not actually the panel or is not
actually the the bend mechanism itself that's sick
now there's still obviously some work to do on the software side and there's
definitely work to do on the panel side making sure that it's not burning in
like that and improving their color accuracy right i forgot one more thing
so comparing the play store icon and amazon icon remember these are known
icons with my samsung note 9 in just the
basic mode and whatever the other one is
without the blue light filter on or anything you can see that there's not
much color depth to the display so the subtleties of colors can get lost a
little bit that's why that youtube play button there is like a shrieking vibrant
red rather than the more subtle red that it would naturally be so still some work
to do on the panel tech but very cool direction and i could
definitely get used to the idea of having something that i can fold up put
in my pocket check that out and then unfold and boom i'm watching full screen
content just like that what an incredible experience for the
future
speaking of the future if you care about the future of your
phone you probably want to get a dbrand grip and a prism screen protector the
dbrand grip is impact resistant it's got
these little lips on the front so even if you put it down on a table or whatever you're not going to scratch
your screen it's got precision cutouts for your camera your touch sensor all
that good stuff and they're super clicky buttons of course you can customize it
with a skin of your choice and their prism screen protector is basically
unbelievable it comes with an applicator so you can put it on perfectly every
time and uh this demo is real i'm actually hammering a nail into a piece
of wood with the front of a screen you take the screen protector off boom
screen's still good i'm not recommending you do it i'm just saying you could if you really really really wanted to so
check them out at the link in the video description guys don't miss any of our ces 2019
content we'd love to see you at the next booth make sure you subscribe so that
you know we make our we all make our appointments that's the thing at ces right Colton making all your
appointments making all your appointments at ces did you make it to all your appointments i
did do you cancel any today yes what i know
dang it