Every generation or so, someone reinvents the computer.
In the late 70s and early 80s,
they got small enough to fit on a desk.
By the 90s, we could fit them in our laps.
And for the last 11 years,
the dominant personal computers have been the ones
that we all carry around in our pockets,
which I guess means we're kind of overdue for a change,
yeah?
Introducing the Nubia Alpha,
the wrist phone with a giant, flexible OLED display
that wraps around your wrist.
This might be the worst product
that I have ever fallen in love with.
And let me tell you why.
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So head over to the two contest pages,
vote for your favorite entered builds,
and earn ballots towards a random draw
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We're gonna have that linked below.
Let's begin with the promotional materials, shall we?
What does Nubia imagine that the Alpha is?
Okay, we got a clock theme going on here.
This guy's talking on the phone.
Ooh, so many functions.
Thanks to the larger screen and wow, video chat.
Ho ho!
So that looks pretty good.
And you know what?
I don't even think they're that far off.
Flexible displays have been a long time coming.
And now that they're finally reaching
the point of commercialization,
I really think that they're one of the best hopes
for wearable technology
to really take off, because if you think about it,
up until now, the vast majority of smart wearables
have been limited to the same sizes and configurations
of the previous dumb wearables, like watches and glasses,
because they're made of fundamentally
the same metal and glass materials.
So that puts restrictions on their designs
that can affect everything from their battery life
to their screen size, and even the ways
that we can interface with them.
So it's this last one that I'm gonna address first
on the Alpha.
So right now, I'm enabling a feature
that they call Alpha Gesture.
What it essentially does is allow you to navigate
through the functions and menus
without actually touching the screen.
So it's similar to some of the hand wavy controls
that are present on some cars,
except that it's implemented on a device
that by its very definition is always close enough
that you could easily reach out
and touch it.
So I'm gonna go ahead and turn that off.
And also, it didn't work consistently at all.
With it enabled, sometimes I'd touch it,
and then it would actually activate twice,
once for the touch and once for the Alpha Gesture.
For now, the thing that I like about it
is that it's a preview of what's to come
with like holographic displays that you can wear
on your wrist and interact with in 3D space.
That's gonna be pretty cool.
Now I wanna talk about the size.
So, yeah.
It still goes on your wrist
like a regular watch or a smartwatch,
but there were a handful of things
that immediately stood out to me,
starting with how much information
could be present on the screen at one time.
Now, at four inches and quite narrow,
the screen is not exactly panoramic,
but it's way bigger than any other smartwatch
that I've ever used.
And unlike a desktop monitor
where I've yet to find a super wide display
that I don't like,
this is an application where more height
actually kind of makes more sense to me.
So, if a text or an email were to come in,
I don't necessarily need a bunch of extraneous space
on the side.
I wanna have as much of the content as possible
right in my field of view,
and a longer display lets me read the average text
or even a short email without any scrolling required.
Or, I mean, at least it would have,
if this thing managed to stay paired to my phone
for longer than a couple of hours at a time.
But that shortfall actually reminds me
of another thing I like about the interface.
When I first put it on,
I was trying to see something at the top of the display,
and I found myself thinking,
oh, gee, this is really not very comfortable.
But you can actually adjust certain UI elements up or down
depending on what's most ergonomic for you.
I can kind of imagine a future then
where my wraparound display is like positionally aware,
and if I'm, you know, sitting at a desk,
it could throw a discreet little notification up
where only I can see it.
I mean, that would be perfect for checking your text
during a bad date or something like that.
Now, in its current form,
the, oh, shut up, Brandon.
Now, in its current form,
the Alpha falls well short of this mark,
having no awareness of its position,
and space other than detecting usually
my check the time gesture
and mostly forgetting where I left things
and not even allowing some key UI elements
to be moved around like entering Wi-Fi passwords.
So this is again, something that I can kind of see
where they're going with,
even if the experience isn't there now.
On the top of the experience,
the experience of wearing the Alpha
is really something that's gonna depend heavily on the user.
So it can be easily resized
by removing links from either both or one side.
It was a touch big on me even at its smallest size though.
So that's something to be aware of.
And it's a little on the bulky side,
but still lower profile than other multifunction smartwatches
that I've worn daily in the past,
like the Casio ProTrek.
And I didn't have any trouble getting sleeves
on and off around it.
Now the always on display functionality,
I'm always harping on smartwatches that don't have it.
Well, it's not enabled at this time,
but while it is still useful,
using an older Snapdragon 2100 processor,
not very power efficient,
I do actually believe them
when they say they will turn that back on in the future.
Since after one really buggy day,
when it died in like four hours,
I've actually regularly gotten
more than a day's worth of battery out of the Alpha.
The standout thing for me about wearing it
is definitely its value as a conversation starter.
Thanks to its large wraparound screen,
it's an attention grabber
that looks more like a cool prop out of a sci-fi movie
than something that you can actually go to a store
and buy today.
Personally, I love it.
I think it looks super cool,
but I've had others, even here on staff,
where we're all admittedly a bunch of nerds,
suggest that giving these to high school kids
would cause teen pregnancy rates to plummet.
I'm pretty sure that if 30% of high schoolers
were wearing that,
you would have teen pregnancy just plummet.
Haters gonna hate, I guess,
but I think the future really is,
the Alpha has a lot of potential
in terms of having these large wearable screens like this one,
and the key word here is future.
The Alpha does not do a great job
of using its large screen real estate overall.
The default watch face dedicates a shocking amount of space
to function toggles with the bottom occupied
by some recent apps that frankly,
I think are just as easy to access
by simply swiping to the side,
few there are but the thing is that's hardly even the biggest problem with the
Alpha. You'll find that right in the name. I can only guess they called it the
Alpha because it hadn't got to the point where they were comfortable calling it
Beta yet. The vibration motor is among the worst I've encountered this decade
making it feel more like it's trying to escape from your wrist than Apple's
tight purposeful haptic feedback. Multiple notifications from a single app
aside from just piling on and making that noise you heard earlier will in
some cases actually remove the first notification. So if someone sends you a
joke in Hangouts followed by lol or an emoji or something you'll actually have
to pull out your phone to find out what was so darn funny. There's no way at this
time to handle media control for third-party apps so you can copy music
files over to your watch and listen to them directly from there over like
Bluetooth headphones but that's it.
you
the ringtone cannot be adjusted a feature that's been a given for a couple
of decades now it's got this whole entire part of the interface that's
dedicated to all these exercises that can track free workout and heart rate
and outdoor running and all that stuff but with this glitch that registered my
daily steps that negative 60,000 I don't know how seriously I'm gonna be taking
any of that and finally while I'm nitpicking the camera kind of sucks
you
but newbie is justification for it existing at all is video chat there's
only one small problem how is this more ergonomic than this I mean if they're
pitching this with eSIM support in China currently as a full-on replacement for a
phone I think the point is there is clearly a lot of work to do but I do see
the vision with WeChat Alipay and a few other key apps someone with full support
in China could take calls pay for their groceries and navigate around town
without ever needing to take a phone out it's just that the experiences far too
buggy to be ready for primetime in fact if I had a dollar for every time I saw
this crash message over the last couple of weeks I could probably just buy
myself a cheap phone but I guess that's the nature of the beast with these first
concept that somehow made its way to a store shelf type products and even if I'm
not gonna be daily driving to the store in this case I'm gonna be driving in a
driving this thing anytime soon,
I'm really glad that Nubia sent it over to me
because it was certainly worth having the experience.
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