What's up everybody,
Jon Porter here from The Verge.
We're checking out the Nubia Alpha.
It looks a lot like a smartwatch
but it's a little different from what you come to expect
rather than scaling everything down to a tiny
smartwatch screen,
what Nubia's actually tried to do
is attempt to pack the entire smartphone experience
into something that's small enough
to fit onto your wrist.
Have they succeeded?
Let's find out.
(upbeat music)
Now the key to making this work
involves a couple of things.
The first one that you've probably already noticed
is this screen it's absolutely massive,
it's a four inch display and it's
it goes further than any alteror I've ever seen.
I kind of worked it out
it looks like it's got an aspect ratio of about
five to one that's a resolution of 960 to
one nine two pixels.
In addition to that they've also put in
what they call a air gestures
where you can kind of wave your hand
over the device and have back controls
they don't have to fill up the screen
with quite as many buttons.
Now having a screen that big
obviously presents a few difficulties.
This thing is absolutely massive
it's got a stainless steel band
which means that it's quite heavy on the wrist.
The screen is kind of curved
around your wrist and the nice thing
about it you can kind of swipe up and
down to mean that the information is
always pointed towards you at any one point in time.
But then compared to an Apple watch
where it's much easier just to turn your wrist towards you
to see the comparatively smaller screen
I feel like it's maybe
solving a problem with its own creation.
You might not have heard of Nubia before they're kind of a
smaller Chinese manufacturers it's originally a
subsidiary of ZTE and they
have made traditional phones
but kind of more recently they've made these
let's call them statement pieces.
There was a phone they did
earlier this year late last year which had two screens
the idea being that like
why put a notch on the front
where you can just have a second screen on the back
and just use the rear camera the entire time.
And this seems like a a similar kind of
lateral thinking approach to the smartwatch problem.
Now let's talk specs.
This thing is packing a Qualcomm Snapdragon wear 2100
which was actually Qualcomm's wearable chip
from back in 2016.
It's got one gigabyte of RAM and eight gigabytes
of onboard storage.
Now one thing this smartwatch smart phone
I'll work it out at some point.
One thing that it has is a five megapixel camera
which not a lot of other wearables come with
and it's also on your wrist which is a little bit weird
but it does mean you can film other people like that
so long as you don't get your finger
in the way of the lens.
So it's got this massive screen
and then you can do lots of things with it
you could send messages,
you can do voice calls,
and then it defaults this t9 dialer
which is lovely and retro and fun but
actually writing a longer message is
something you'd have to practice.
Now this will come in a couple of different colors
and a couple of different versions.
There's black and there's gold
which would pay a small price premium for.
But the two different versions
are actually quite interesting because
as well as a Bluetooth version that pairs to your phone
like a traditional smartwatch
there's also an e-sim version
which you'll be able to use as more of a standalone device.
Now if you want the Bluetooth model that's
going to set you 449 Euros in Europe
when it will be available from April.
But if you want to hold out for the e-sim model
that's not coming to the West until q3
and it will cost you an extra hundred euros
so that'll be 549 Euros.
If you really want to splash out
you can go for the gold model
which also comes with the e-sim functionality
and will cost you 649 Euros
and that'll also be available in q3.
Over the past 12 months we've seen some pretty interesting
ideas about combining different form factors,
we had Apple and Google kind of tryna combine elements
of like the tablet and the laptop into one super device
and it's almost as though Nubia kind of looked at this
and went, what can we combine?
And decided that the smartwatch and the smartphone
were kinda fair game.
I mean, does anyone need this?
Probably not.
Does anyone want this?
Maybe.
But is it really cool?
Yeah.
Thank you so much for checking out the Nubia Alpha
smartwatch nwc 2019.
Well we've also covered
all of the biggest announcements
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just reading about them on our website at theverge.com
Cya guys.