(upbeat music)
- Okay, concept phones.
The marketing machine strikes again.
So, all right, OnePlus has been hyping up
and teasing this concept phone with these images
for the past week or so by the time you see this.
It's looking pretty spicy.
It's got a lot of people wondering about it.
Meanwhile, I've been testing the phone
for about three weeks now.
This is the actual phone.
Now again, the fact that it's a concept phone
means it's not coming out anytime soon,
like it doesn't have any true parallel
to a current OnePlus phone,
but it's meant to demonstrate something cool
or unique that they're just not shipping.
And so with this one,
it's an active cooling system
that they're calling KryoFlux technology.
Active KryoFlux is what it says
on the back, so you can see it.
I think it actually looks super sick.
If you look closely at the back of the phone here,
you can see this icy blue liquid pulsing
through these channels over the back,
and it's over the hottest parts of the phone.
It's keeping the battery and the CPU and GPU cool.
And then it's around the camera bump too.
You can see it up here flowing around this circle
around the multi-camera system.
I'm not sure liquid flowing around the camera bump
would actively contribute to cooling in a useful way,
but eh, it sure does look sick.
It's hard to appreciate it fully on camera,
but just holding it in my hands, looking at it,
especially if you go into a darker room,
you can see these bubbles that make it
clear that there's some type of liquid running
over the back of the phone.
The only thing is it doesn't work, like at all.
Like all the stuff that I said that it would be cool
if it did like cooling CPU and GPU and battery,
it doesn't actually do that.
Like it does have the liquid flowing through
the channels to make it look like it's cooling things.
But this doesn't actively contribute
to the cooling in this phone.
Just looks like it does.
So this concept phone is designed to show the possibilities
of what a working version
of this could look like or maybe an exaggerated version
of this could look like, but that's just it.
It's just what it could look like.
So, okay, what if it did really work?
Well, OnePlus told me that they believe a future version
of KryoFlux that is actually working would reduce
the phone's charging temperature by 1.6 degrees Celsius,
which would allow it to charge from zero to 100
up to one minute faster and reduce gaming temperatures
by up to 2.1 degrees Celsius,
which could translate
to an extra two to four frames per second.
And that's what they told me.
So that's probably the absolute best case
optimistic version of what they got in their testing.
Basically there's a good reason why this is showing up
in a concept phone and not in an actual real shipping phone,
which is like this,
adds a lot of complexity and potentially cost and thickness.
Obviously you have the liquid and the pumps and everything.
Not that this is like a super thick phone,
but it adds thickness,
all for not a ton of benefit,
this is very concept phone thing to do.
Like we do have the ASUS ROG phone
and the Lenovo Legion Duel,
I dunno if you remember that phone.
These are some of the only phones in the world
that I've seen that have actually tried real active cooling.
And even that was different. It wasn't KryoFlux.
It was like a fan accessory that plugs into the back.
These phones sacrificed water resistance and thinness
and they're expensive niche phones, but they did it.
So why show this off
if you're not actually intending on making it
into an actual phone you're gonna ship and sell?
Well, the answer, like so many other things
with a lot of these companies is marketing, right?
So these companies do spend a lot of money on R&D,
on research and development and they're constantly coming
up with new ideas that get proposed and then
mocked up and then prototyped and tested and adjusted.
And a lot of these things end up making it into a phone.
But the ones that don't, they don't make it to the end.
Maybe they just get repackaged and turned
into a nice concept for people to admire their hard work,
and then they don't actually make it to a phone.
It's kind of like how we can be confident
that somewhere in Apple's headquarters
there is an iPhone with USB-C just for testing.
There's no way they haven't tested it yet at this point,
but they're not going to turn around
and packaging it up and showing it off as a concept phone.
It'll be kind of funny if they did actually,
but that's something they keep under the surface.
But the companies that do this concept phone thing,
this is really just about getting a little bit of PR return,
little positive marketing return
for all the dollars that you spent on research
and development that didn't end up making it
into final products that you could eventually market
as if they were going to be in customers' hands,
which is fine.
I can't really be mad at that, but at the same time,
I am holding a cool idea that's not
gonna be a real feature in a phone.
So I put together a little list of concept phones
just so you can see what we're working with here.
And I've put them in order of worst to best
based on how much I wanted them to become a real thing.
So in 2020, OnePlus did another concept phone.
They're no stranger to these.
This is a phone with a color-changing back.
It could change colors for fun or even
as a notification indicator using electrochromic glass.
The reason it never came to a real phone is
because electrochromic glass is insanely expensive
and difficult to make efficient in a tiny smartphone,
but hey, your phone could change colors.
Then this year there was a Xiaomi concept phone based
on the 12S Ultra that let you attach a physical
like a lens to the back of the camera system on the phone.
Cool idea to be able to attach
and use different high quality lenses
for different focal lengths on the back of your phone.
But the fact is you're still extremely limited
by the one inch smartphone sensor underneath.
And by the time you put all that extra hardware up
and you're carrying around several lenses,
most people would rather just carry a regular good camera
that's gonna take great pictures
with a larger sensor anyway.
Then there's TCl.
TCL also is no stranger to concept phones,
and they brought one
to CES this year with a paper-like matte display.
This is kind of interesting,
it's like a Kindle, kind of cool idea.
I actually love the thought
of having a full color but fully fingerprintless
and reflection-free display on a phone.
But this one isn't coming
to a real phone either because, well,
TCL isn't sure if there's gonna be enough people interested
in it and also people who actually got to use it
also noticed the finish does take a big hit
to the brightness overall.
And there will also be some durability questions too.
With a normal smartphone with regular glass,
you can go to Corning and buy their best, hardest,
strongest Gorilla Glass and that's typically fine.
But with this,
you couldn't buy some off the shelf strong glass.
So you don't know.
It might be a little bit brittle,
it might be a little bit scratch-prone.
That's the type of thing that they're worried about.
Now Vivo did a concept phone
in 2019 with no buttons and no ports.
It had haptic pressure-sensitive areas around the body
and pogo pins for charging and data instead of a port.
That's not what I liked about it though.
What I liked was it also had a full screen
under display fingerprint reader.
So instead of it having to be
in this like specific area right in the bottom
of the middle where you have to nail it every time,
might take more than one try, on this concept,
you can literally unlock with your fingerprint
by just touching anywhere on the screen,
which is kind of crazy.
This is an evolution of what they did back
with the first Apex concept phone,
which was in 2018 which was a bezel-less concept
with a pop-up camera and a half screen fingerprint sensor.
I just like the idea of being able to add more
than one finger at once for extra security.
That would've been super sick.
But yeah, an optical sensor that big is extremely,
extremely expensive.
Way too expensive for a phone.
Now OnePlus also did a concept phone
at CES 2020 that I thought was really interesting.
It used electrochromic glass again.
So hey, too expensive.
But this time it's to darken
or lighten just the glass over the rear camera.
And it was cool.
It could hide it
if you went all the way dark and it had this sleek look,
but also it could be used as a sort of an ND shade
for reducing the amount of light that gets in.
So taking pictures outdoors or in bright light, again,
it would've been cool to see,
but that tech is just not efficient enough to miniaturize
and put in smartphones right now.
So that McLaren edition concept phone is never gonna happen.
And then maybe the most interesting concept phone
of them all is all these
foldable rollable crazy stuff that we've seen
from several companies.
So TCL did a Fold 'N Roll
with an accordion hinge back in the day when
that was the only way anyone knew how to do it.
Motorola though did a rollable concept phone
that actually extends its height from the top
like a magic trick.
And LG did a rollable phone that extended
in the landscape direction, RIP to LG.
But all these concepts, you guessed it,
never shipped or never turned into real phones
or real products,
of course for various reliability and cost reasons
that make perfect sense.
So at this point, it feels like we have the formula
for how a concept phone is born,
like how a star is born in the universe,
which is like, all right, spend a lot
of money on research and development and various ideas
will make it all the way through the prototyping stage
and get into the final product, which is cool.
Some of them won't make it quite to the end,
but we can still repackage them
into a concept phone and show off how cool it could be.
And I guess on one hand I can't really be salty
that they're spending a lot
of energy on new research and development.
It's cool that we get new ideas.
But then also, yeah, concept phone,
kind of just a PR stunt at the end of the day.
Why not both?
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.
(upbeat music)