The return of mechanical structure is a "Renaissance" for mobile phones

Physics defines "time" as a unit of measurement that always moves forward - the transition between two hyperfine energy levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom corresponds to the duration of 9192631770 cycles of radiation, and this blue planet has passed one second. The irreversibility of time determines that for things that have passed away, we can often only commemorate and remember them, because they are all gone and cannot be retrieved with all our heart and soul.

However, art and design don’t think so. After the darkness of the Middle Ages, prosperous Europe ushered in the three-century-long Renaissance. The emerging bourgeoisie "regenerated" the high prosperity of thought and humanistic art in the Greek and Roman classical periods through those wonderful paintings, sculptures, music and literary works. This is also seen as the transition of mankind from the theistic era centered on God to a new era centered on humanism.

[[236784]]

Before the advent of the era of large-screen smartphones led by the iPhone, even Nokia did not dominate the era. The ignorant mobile phone industry was like the era when ancient Greek and Roman art and philosophy prevailed. Manufacturers and designers had no precedents to follow, which meant that there was no inherent logical concept in design - flip, candy, slide and rotating products emerged in an endless stream. The fascinating mechanical structure made the mobile phone full of the logical aesthetics of the 1950s.

This stage of flourishing and contending schools of thought was ultimately succumbed to the era of smartphones dominated by pragmatism. In the past five years of changes in mobile phones, screens have become larger, structures have become tighter, and shell materials have become more outstanding. The fun of being able to push out the screen and unscrew the keyboard seems to be gone forever - everyone knows that homogeneity and accelerated iterations not only trouble smartphone designers, but also make it difficult for manufacturers to stop fighting "aesthetic fatigue."

But just like the Renaissance that broke out from the long-suppressed divinity, the true full-screen mobile phones Find X and NEX launched by OPPO and vivo this year once again brought pure mechanics back to mobile phones. Through the ingenious lifting design, they hide the front camera and sensors that affect the visual elements, further increasing the screen-to-body ratio to an unprecedented height.

Innovation is like a cycle. After coming and going, we will eventually return to the starting point.

The mechanical structure of mobile phones has always been smaller and more beautiful

In April 1973, an ordinary man stood at a New York conference room, holding up a device that seemed to be the size of two bricks, and made the first mobile phone call in human history. A year later, Motorola officially put it into mass production - DynaTAC 8000X was officially launched. This device worth $4,000 needed 10 hours of charging to maintain 35 minutes of continuous talk time.

In the following 20 years, mobile phones have maintained a brick-like candy-bar shape. No one really likes to carry an ugly device weighing several kilograms on the street, but due to the limitations of analog communication components, the road to miniaturization of mobile phones has not been smooth.

The change occurred in 1995, when Motorola, which had made the first mobile phone in human history, released the 8900. It was the world's first product to adopt a flip-cover design. The keyboard of the phone was hidden under the panel by flipping down the cover, making the whole machine look simpler and more elegant, and to a certain extent reducing the possibility of users accidentally operating the phone when putting it in their pockets.

This was an interesting idea, which led to many peers imitating it, and even derived more new ideas to make mobile phones more compact and light. For example, Motorola's rival Nokia at the time used the "slider" as a selling point and launched the 8110 with a downward sliding cover. With the global popularity of "The Matrix" in 1999, this phone also became the key to Nokia's complete rise and dominance in the market.

Siemens, also a European manufacturer, launched the world's first real slider phone SL10 the year before - the screen and navigation keys are placed on the top, and the numeric keys are separated from the screen by a slider structure. Perhaps Siemens itself did not expect that SL10 would become a pioneer and create an important category of mobile phones in the future. In fact, compared with traditional candy-bar phones, the smaller design of "slider phones" has indeed quickly gained market popularity.

The "slider" structure can hide the keyboard, making the phone smaller, and the "flip" design can do the same. The mechanical structure has quietly provided countless possibilities for the miniaturization of mobile phones. Also in 1999, Motorola released the "Palm Treasure" series. The 328 and 308, which seem a bit bulky now, were pioneering at the time. Later, flip phones sprang up like mushrooms after rain and became the most important mobile phone product besides candy-bar phones. Later, Sony Ericsson even launched a rotating mobile phone product, which was a new breakthrough in appearance.

"Hide the ugly things and make them look more beautiful and smaller", this may be the biggest advantage that mechanical structure can bring to mobile phone products. Even in the era of smart phones, this has not changed. For example, it is hard to forget the Milestone series, which is an important contributor to the rise of Motorola. It completely hides the QWERTY keyboard under the body through the sliding cover design. When you need it, you can slide it out through the slide cover. The ME600, in the name of "backflip", has carried forward the rotary keyboard.

With a bigger screen and a smaller body, OV's "innovation" is the beginning of a new cycle

Just like Milestone and ME600 use a sliding mechanical structure to achieve a balance between the full keyboard and the screen size, OPPO's Find X and vivo NEX actually apply the same idea, except that the latter has completely abandoned the need for a physical keyboard. This time, the target that needs to be eliminated has become the front camera and a series of sensors.

Undoubtedly, this is related to users' expectations of smartphone functions. Since 2014, large-screen smartphones have spoiled users' appetites, and everyone wants smartphones to have a larger display field of view; however, our hands have not evolved again, and they constantly remind our brains to prefer products that are more suitable for holding and using. Therefore, the smartphone industry continues to explore the ultimate balance between the size and volume of mobile phone screens.

As early as a few years ago, a number of manufacturers led by Meizu and ZUK began to increase the display area of ​​mobile phone screens by reducing the screen borders. Later, Sharp and Nubia used the visual refraction of the screen edge as the technical basis to completely make the left and right borderless possible, while Samsung took a different approach by using the left and right hyperbolic screens to visually reduce the existence of the left and right borders. Although the directions are different, they have both increased the screen viewing area to a certain extent.

In 2017, LG first broadened the user's vision by changing the screen width ratio. This is a very effective approach. After solving the left and right borders, it also pointed out a new way forward for manufacturers - continue to remove the upper and lower borders. So we saw that Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S9 continued to operate on the chin and forehead, constantly refreshing the data. The products led by iPhone X chose to remove the chin of the phone first, encapsulating the front camera, sensors and other components in the forehead area, and cutting out a special "bangs" component through the special-shaped screen to increase the visible area of ​​the screen.

This not-so-famous notch screen did win in the smartphone market in 2018. Even though it has its own flaws in display integrity, it has benefited from the favor of the upstream industry chain, and most mainstream products this year have adopted a similar module design.

But everyone knows that bangs are always used to cover up the "ugliness". No matter how it is modified, it is a scar hanging on the top of the screen. On the road to ***, there may be other ways. OPPO and vivo have undoubtedly made a different attempt - returning to the mechanical structure, completely hiding the components that affect the screen-to-body ratio, and only appearing when in use, so that we don't have to choose between bangs and screens.

In fact, the lifting structure of OPPO and vivo is like a reincarnation of "innovation". As early as ten years ago, Samsung M509 first used the lifting method to hide the huge 5-megapixel camera and screen in the candy-bar body, and Sony Ericsson C902 also developed the same idea a few years later.

This is by no means to prove that these devices that have left a strong mark in history are suspected of plagiarism. It can only show that the mechanical structure will never be "outdated" in the design of technological products. It is like a fashion element. When a bottleneck appears, it will shine differently every few years.

Maybe it’s not the perfect answer, but the exploration never stops.

Innovation is a double-edged sword. It provides a new look and feel, but it can also easily cause some concerns among the outside world. The first issue is the service life. The lifting structure of OPPO Find X and vivo NEX can be used hundreds of thousands of times. Generally speaking, such a lifespan is sufficient for the life cycle of a smartphone. To be more direct, both OPPO and vivo have promised that the lifting structure will not be the first component in the phone to have problems.

However, users' concerns about mechanical structures are not groundless. No matter how sophisticated the automatic mechanical structure is, it is easy to suffer irreversible wear after a period of cyclic use. Its reliability is indeed lower than that of circuits or pure manual structures. At the same time, due to the size of the micro motor, it is inevitable that higher requirements are placed on the internal space design of the mobile phone. Although OPPO, Find X and vivo NEX are excellent in length and width, the thickness of the whole machine is still not thin and light.

Therefore, I do not think that the lifting mechanical structure is the best solution for smartphones to enter the "full screen" market, but it is indeed a better solution compared to the ugly notch screen. Both OPPO Find X and vivo NEX have become the most "immersive" mobile phones in the current market with a screen-to-body ratio of over 90%. At a time when competitors are generally still "squeezing toothpaste", this innovation is even more valuable.

From explosive growth to slowing shipments, the smartphone industry has finally entered adulthood. The decline in users’ desire to replace their phones and the bottleneck of function replacement have forced the five major manufacturers to no longer satisfy the market with new products that are neither good nor bad as before. Smart consumers have developed a keen eye, and only truly outstanding products can stimulate their desire to buy.

At least from this point of view, OPPO and vivo have indeed embarked on the right path, and the success of Find X and NEX may also inspire domestic smartphones to practice bolder innovations in the future and usher in a "Renaissance" in the smartphone era.