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Lucky LG employees can reportedly buy the company's last unreleased phones, including the Rollable
"Lucky" so long as you don't value, like, software support or anything
LG's ignoble exit from the smartphone business made headlines last month. But an international electronics giant doesn't simply flip a switch and exit a market: there were plenty of in-development phones still floating around LG offices and factories when it decided to stop making them. According to one noted leaker, the company is selling off the last Android phones it will ever make straight to its employees.
Oppo X 2021 flexes its impressive rollable screen in these hands-on videos
It’s basically a Transformer that fits your palm (and is real)
The advent of flexible OLED screens has let the smartphone industry experiment with some pretty unorthodox form factors. While foldables have slowly been creeping into the mainstream, companies like Oppo have been playing with rollable designs. Following its showcase as a concept last fall, some lucky users are getting an early chance to go hands-on with the Oppo X 2021.
The LG Rollable will go on sale in 2021
An LG spokesperson confirmed that we won't have to wait too long for it
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LG isn't making the best-selling smartphones these days, but we have to admit that the South Korean company does have a flair for thinking out of the box, as we've seen with unorthodox models like the LG Wing. While so far we haven't seen any phones with foldable displays like Samsung or Motorola produce, today we're checking out a possible step in that direction with the Rollable concept phone LG just teased at CES 2021.
Forget foldables — Oppo's latest concept phone is rollable
It uses a motorized scroll mechanism to expand and contract
There are a lot of weird phones out there, but I've never seen one quite like this before. Oppo's new concept phone, the Oppo X 2021, might at first appear to be a standard 2020 phone with a 6.7" display. One quick swipe on the side, however, and the screen expands to a more tablet-like 7.4" size. Magic? Almost — it's thanks to a flexible screen and a motorized scroll mechanism.
Here's what a Pixel 4a 5G looks like in an alternate dimension
If, by 'alternate dimension,' you supposedly mean Vietnam...
We've gotten a few sneak peeks over the past couple of weeks of what the Pixel 5 might look like in full. The indications are there to say that Google is completely done with the dual-tone back design. But one should never turn down a venture into an alternative timeline — so it doe looks like with this one picture of what appears to be a Pixel 4a 5G prototype from Vietnam.
Possible Sony Xperia Play 2 prototype surfaces eight years after it was canceled
Much sleeker than the Play 1 and looks like it had a 3D gimmick on board
Gaming phones are commonplace now that mobile gaming has reached a level of maturity, although most half-decent phones can play modern games to a pretty good standard these days anyway. Rewind back to 2011, and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play 1 was a unique proposition with its slide-out PlayStation gamepad and stereo speakers. A follow-up was sadly canceled, but it appears as though images of a prototype have surfaced all these years later.
Have you ever looked at a chameleon and thought, "Why can't my smartphone do that?" Vivo apparently has, and is working on a smartphone prototype that can change color using electrochromic glass. This is the same special material OnePlus recently used to hide a smartphone camera. But while OnePlus only covered the camera module in this fancy glass, Vivo has made the entire back panel out of the stuff, showing it off on video earlier this week.
Buy the Essential phone dock that was never released on eBay (Update: Not for sale)
The timing is suspect to say the least
Seeing no clear path to bring its weird GEM concept phone to market, Andy Rubin's Essential abruptly stopped being a company earlier this week. Now, by complete coincidence, a bundle of Essential swag has appeared for sale on eBay — including an unreleased charging dock.
An interview with OnePlus' industrial design team was published to the company's forums earlier today, and though most of it is the sort of self-praise and directed discussion you'd expect to read, one genuinely interesting tidbit was revealed: Two photos of an unreleased OnePlus Concept One prototype. That's right, concept phones also have prototypes, and one of OnePlus' earlier efforts to design a phone in collaboration with McLaren was an all-black design.
Front-facing cameras that are able to see through smartphone display panels were theorized long before we thought it even possible to produce them and some see them as something of a holy grail in the oh-so-noble fight against bezels. Recent teases from Xiaomi and Oppo would lead us to believe the technology could make it into a consumer product sooner rather than later, and now I've had a chance to see what stage it's currently at. It's not ready quite yet, but it shouldn't be too far out now.
Google isn't ready to sell us a foldable phone just yet because it's thinking what a number of people are: there's just no good use for one — at least for now, anyways. But the company stands ready to continue research and develop on concepts as it has publicly admitted to prototyping foldables.
We could start off this story by bagging the poor Apple technician that left a pre-production iPhone 4 at a bar and rehashing the Gizmodo saga from 2010. But the truth is that we've all lost things while we're in the middle of doing something else like say, sitting on a train. One poor Honor employee in Germany might find faint solace in that assurance as the company has turned to the public for help in finding a prototype smartphone.
It turns out that public transportation is useful not just to get from A to B, but also for spotting unreleased devices. A photo of an alleged Galaxy S10 with a hole-punch display was posted on r/Samsung several hours ago, with a claimed Samsung employee joining the comments section with some more information and even an impromptu AMA.
Recently, ZTE's foldable Axon M made a bit of a wave by being released with not one, but two 5.2" 1080p displays. It was a bold move, but it obviously hasn't sold well. It looks like Samsung experimented with the same idea back in 2015-2016, ultimately choosing to scrap the project. But some leaked images of it, dubbed "Project V," have recently surfaced, showing what could have been.
We saw a lot of things at Mobile World Congress this year, but one of the wildest was the Vivo Apex. Even if the name isn't familiar, you've probably seen photos of it. This prototype phone was almost entirely screen, and it had a pop-up camera instead of a notch. Now, Vivo appears to be on the verge of launching the phone. The company has sent out invites for an Apex announcement in Shanghai on June 12th.
Doogee has been slinging affordable smartphones since 2013. For the most part, they haven't been anything to write home about—rectangles with screens and cameras, like so many others. But YouTuber Mrwhosetheboss got his hands on a prototype of the Doogee Mix 4, and it's certainly striking, with teeny tiny bezels on all sides of the display and a sliding design to hide the earpiece and front-facing camera. We've seen leaked photos of the device, but this is the first time it's been shown on video.
Prototypes are always cool to see, but us consumers don't often get to do so. It's nice to take a look at how the designs of products evolve from the drawing board all the way to our homes, pockets, and backpacks. An interview with Google hardware designer Ivy Ross recently went up on The Keyword, and embedded within are photos of several Google products' prototypes.
The original NVIDIA Shield Portable (just called 'NVIDIA Shield' at first) was released back in 2013, and is still a very unique device. It had the form factor of a flip handheld console, like a Nintendo DS, but was much beefier and used NVIDIA's own Tegra 4 chipset. The result was a beast of a gaming system that ran stock Android, and could stream games from your PC (as long as you had an NVIDIA GPU).
Today is just one day away from OnePlus' announcement, and everyone is eagerly anticipating the final reveal of the company's latest flagship. While we while away the last 24 hours in anticipation of the OnePlus 5 launch event, the fine folks over at The Verge were able to get an exclusive with the company about the new camera setup in the upcoming phone. The article explains a lot of the design decisions that had to be made and demonstrates how OnePlus iterated upon different configurations.
With the OnePlus 5 now confirmed for a summer release, design and spec leaks have started to emerge much more frequently. The successor to the popular flagship-on-a-budget OnePlus 3/3T is shaping up to be another powerful device, with rumors also suggesting it will have an in vogue dual camera set-up. Now, thanks to Android Authority, we have an image of an alleged prototype to whet our appetite further.