Gadgetory

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 voting on the builds Gigi stock cooling showdown is open so head over to the to contest pages vote for your favorite entered builds and earn balance towards a random draw for awesome hardware prizes 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 is talking on the phone hmm so many functions thanks the larger screen and Wow video chat oh wow 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've called 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 wavey 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 going to be pretty cool now I want to talk about the size so yeah it still goes on your wrist like a regular watch or Smart Watch but there were a handful if they 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 have 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 want to 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 short fall 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 it 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 so 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 it could throw a discrete 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 it's now in its current form the Alpha falls well short of this mark having no awareness of its position in space other than detecting usually my check the time gesture and mostly forgetting where I left things and 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 going to 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 pro track 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 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 suggests that giving these to high school kids would cause teen pregnancy rates to plummet I'm pretty sure that if thirty percent 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 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 Reese that's that frankly I think are just as easy to access by simply swiping to the side and finding the relevant one especially given how 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 wrists than apples 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 wall 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 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 heartrate 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 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 isom 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 Aldi Pei 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 oh it's just that the experience is 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 going to be daily driving this thing any time soon I'm really glad that Nubia sent it over to me because it was certainly worth having the experience the math drop cost porta pro-x headphones are actually based on the original 1984 cost design they've been updated to make them more modern and durable but they're portable they're on air and they can be folded up in different configurations for easy storage they feature oxygen free copper voice coils that provide a wide frequency response and warm and smooth sound the single button control lets you skip tracks make calls and activate voice commands and they've got a noise cancelling mic with classes lifetime warranty so why don't you join the drop today at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool strips all ripped II though it's got cool shirts and our community forum which you should totally join