Gadgetory

our CES 2019 covered is brought to you by D brand the D brand 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 PI 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 claimed that the actual display layer of their tech here is just point zero one 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 on to 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 in specs it's running Snapdragon 850 five six or eight gigs of ram 128 or 256 gigs of storage 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 either portrait or landscape mode that is a four by three display if you're into the mobile productivity you can fold it up and use it like this and you're gonna end up with a sixteen by nine 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 and what they call 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 passing 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 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 the secondary screen it uses 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 like there's still a little bit of placeholder Chinese in the OS look they're not planning to launch this in the US 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 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 gonna go like that stereo speakers if you're in tablet mode or you're gonna have to switch to while 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 a clock icon there's kind of a shadow that even moves around as I swiped 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 sometime and we all know that burnin can be an issue with AMOLED technology and it appears that the the state that they're in right now is one we're burnin 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 I con with my samsung note 9 in just the basic mode and whatever the other one is without the 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 fullscreen content just like that what an incredible experience for the future speaking of the future if you care about the future your phone you probably want to get a deep brand grip and a prism screen protector the deep brand 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 the 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 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 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 your appointment I did do you cancel any today yes I know dang it