"Toys for high-end users."
This is many people's first impression of folding screen mobile phones: high-end, toys. Once upon a time, the originator of mobile communication tools, Big Brother, was also regarded as the exclusive property of high-end users.
In the 1990s, Big Brother was born. Despite its bulky size, poor battery life, and weak signal, it did not prevent it from becoming the darling of the communications world. At that time, the epoch-making significance of big brother came from its tool attributes, which actually solved many pain points of users. And after several iterations, there are today's smart phones.
Today's folding screen has the same fate, it is criticized by creases, fragile constitutions and application adaptations. The pricing of tens of thousands of people has made people sigh even more. More common, rarely commonly used, folding screen is a toy for high-end users.
The road is obstructed and long, and the line is coming. At the key node of folding screen commercialization for two years, OPPO officially launched its first folding screen mobile phone OPPO Find N, and put forward the core concept of "from early adopter to common use" to the industry. Judging from the price of 7699 yuan alone, it has occupied a turning point in the development of the folding screen industry.
This means that the future folding screen will no longer be exclusive to minorities, and more people will be exposed to the futuristic sense of screen folding.
Small enough and big enough
How can I build trust with a strange partner as quickly as possible? Deliver results.
So how to make a new thing accepted as soon as possible? Make it useful. Although the folding screen has developed for several years, its toy properties are still greater than the tool properties. The core of "tools" is: easy to pick up, easy to use. Just like a normal mobile phone.
OPPO Chief Product Officer Liu Zuohu has more than once described OPPO Find N as "small enough and big enough". It does not simply refer to the shape design of the mobile phone, but more importantly, the thinking logic behind it.
When folded, the OPPO Find N is like a 5.49-inch small-screen flagship phone, slightly larger than the iPhone 13mini, even small users can grasp it with one hand. The 18:9 screen ratio and the 73mm width of the machine happen to be the golden ratio for one-handed use, and usually, the reach of the thumb-controlled outer screen is about 85%.
The significance of its external screen ratio is that when you are active outside and it is inconvenient to open the inner screen to use, the external screen can also be used as smoothly as using an ordinary mobile phone.
Unlock, use, lock screen, put in pocket. A truly easy-to-use mobile phone should not have a sense of obtrusiveness, and a good folding screen mobile phone should not be limited to the inner screen is bright enough. I think this is what Liu Zuohu said at the press conference that "the outer screen is as easy to use as the inner screen."
When expanded, OPPO Find N is a 7.1-inch landscape screen that supports a 120Hz refresh rate. Its ratio is different from the previous folding screen, and the 8.4:9 ratio is more like a Kindle Oasis , an e-book.
You know, the vertical design of today's ordinary smartphones is largely to meet the needs of one-handed holding, but our eyes are actually growing horizontally, which means that when we look at the world, the left and right perspectives are wider and more natural than the upper and lower perspectives.
So you will find that whether it is a paper book or a TV computer screen, it is a horizontal design. So in larger screen states, OPPO Find N essentially provides a screen state that conforms to the body's natural intuition.
Some people will think that the folding screen is a tablet after unfolding, not also. Even if the folding screen is the product of the industry's pursuit of a larger screen, it is not blindly increasing the size. In the past few years, there have been large-screen mobile phones between mobile phones and tablets, and it has proved that it does not have enough vitality, because really grasping the size and the comfort point of actual use is the focus of major manufacturers to consider the folding form.
At the press conference, OPPO showed some of the engineering machines they have designed in the past four years, with left and right folding, up and down folding, inward folding and outer folding, and a total of 26 design schemes have been tried.
Product manager Zhou Yibao said that during the testing phase of OPPO Find N, they conducted in-depth sampling of mainstream users. Found an interesting phenomenon, outdoors, everyone prefers to use the external screen independently to complete the operation, and indoors, the static state will open the large screen for diversified entertainment and other operations, and the proportion of the two is almost equal.
So driven by the "small enough, big enough" philosophy, the team finally finalized the current golden ratio. At this point, the folding screen has actually initially departed from the toy attribute and gradually changed to a tool.
The creases are elegant and the hinged hard core
Since it is folded, there must be creases. In the past, folding screen products either had obvious creases or unsatisfactory folding forms. Fish and bear paws naturally cannot be combined, and things that violate the laws of physics naturally cannot happen.
Crease removal is a false proposition, and crease relief is an achievable goal. The crease of oppo Find N is light enough and tight enough when folded.
Specifically, OPPO tackles the crease problem in two ways. First, optimize the way the screen is folded, and the other is to use materials that are less likely to produce creases.
The folding method directly involves the design of the hinged structure. At present, the common U-shaped hinge on the market is followed by a teardrop hinge.
The representative of the U-shaped hinge is Samsung's Fold series, which can be seen as folding a piece of A4 paper in half, and the folding end will form a circle with a bending radius of 0mm, and the crease is very obvious.
Teardrop hinges are less likely to produce creases, but the structure is relatively complex and the cost is higher. It is to reduce screen creases by increasing the bend radius. Imagine pinching the ends of an A4 paper and folding it to form a teardrop-like curve with a very large bend radius and almost no creases when unfolded.
In practice, OPPO's teardrop hinges have a bending radius of 3mm, while the U-hinge has a regular bending radius of 1.5mm, increasing the bending radius by 200% and reducing the crease by 48%.
However, there is no "take-ism" in industrial design, and the hinge used by OPPO Find N is a self-developed Seiko imitation vertebral hinge. The R&D lasted 4 years, iterated 6 times before and after, the hinge covered 125 patents, a total of 136 parts (about 60 U-hinges), and the cost reached about 4 times that of ordinary hinges.
More sophisticated construction means higher process requirements. OPPO Find N hinge part set more than 400 key size control standards, the highest precision of 0.01mm, only one-tenth of a piece of paper, is currently the most complex process, the highest cost of folding screen mobile phone hinge.
Even people in the industry say that the Seiko vertebral hinge designed by OPPO may be the most perfect design at present.
However, in the second step of reducing creases, seiko imitation vertebral hinges encountered a problem: they could not match the flexible screen provided by Samsung.
Zhou Yibao revealed that because seiko quasi-vertebral hinges are too advanced in the industry, the past flexible screen matching hinge scheme is not suitable for OPPO Find N. Samsung, as a supplier, also believes that the hinge scheme is difficult to match. So OPPO once again invested in self-research and worked with Samsung to overcome the new matching scheme.
OPPO and Samsung each promoted two versions of the program, and then jointly optimized and adjusted the final plan. Eventually we can see that oppo Find N is equipped with a flexible inner screen with creases that are almost invisible.
The outer layer of the screen is made of UTG glass of 0.03mm, which is 300% stronger than the impact resistance of traditional CPI membranes. Using the self-developed patented reticulate matrix, the dense and moderate reticulate shape is redesigned for the dynamic change of the curvature of the water droplets. This seemingly simple process, the two teams have run into 18 programs, after reducing the stress in the bending area by 30%, again on the screen around the other structure of the machine for more than ten sets of comparative testing and continuous optimization, the screen crease once again reduced by 30%.
In contrast, oppo Find N unfolds the crease, which is in stark contrast to other products.
Compared with the razr 5G and Fold 3 creases, the judgment is high
After completing the key hinge design, OPPO further considered the feel of the folding screen opening and closing. After all, the folding screen is still a rare form of product, and the sense of ceremony is a part that must be missing.
Liu Zuohu said that the OPPO Find N "snapped" together, just like the feeling of the car door closing.
But who can think of that a smooth "pop", OPPO designed a total of 16 versions of hinge cam scheme for it, spent 1 year calibrating the feel, in order to achieve a labor-saving, stretch and soothing effect.
In technology products, behind all the elegant surfaces, they are supported by hard-core technology. The folding screen seems to be just two screens spliced together, but it is actually just the right mechanical structure and people-oriented thinking process. No technology product is the exception.
Practicality depends on the software
The software adaptation of the folding screen is the same problem for all manufacturers. The inner and outer screens of the folding screen cannot be simply split into two screens of different sizes to use, otherwise it will lose the meaning of folding.
"Folding" actually has plenty of room for practical applications to dig, as long as you have endless imagination.
OPPO Find N can not only act as the role of a flat plate after unfolding, but also rely on its own excellent Seiko quasi-vertebral hinge structure, freely control the opening and closing angle, and create a new form of use.
OPPO calls this the "free hover" feature. When the folding screen is expanded at an angle greater than or equal to 90°, you can use the upper half of the screen to display the video screen, while the lower screen transforms into a trackpad to complete the drag and drop progress bar, increase and decrease the volume, etc.; when the angle is less than 90°, you can place it firmly on the plane and shoot the starry sky with 4K time-lapse photography.
Otherwise, let's combine the outer screen with the rear camera. Use the rear camera to take someone else or take a selfie, and the outer screen can be used as a framing preview. Convenient for yourself, but also convenient for shooting girlfriends.
The fun of the folding screen lies in this, but the practicality does not stop there.
Thanks to the large inner screen, oppo Find N naturally has the potential for multitasking. In this matter, OPPO Find N is bent on aligning itself with big brothers.
Left and right split screens? Just slide your finger down in the middle of the screen. You can even drag apps directly from the sidebar into the screen to automatically split the screen.
Think it's too wasteful to display an interface on a large screen? That's okay, the parallel window feature allows different interfaces for some applications to be displayed on both the left and right sides at the same time.
Want to continue with your previous tasks after closing the screen? Of course. When the user closes the phone from the large screen mode, the external screen will display "swipe up to continue to use, automatically lock the screen after 3 seconds", at this time, if you choose to slide up, the outer screen can continue the previous operation, if you want to lock the screen, you do not need to operate.
All software adaptation operations, OPPO is serving instinct and intuition. Although the folding screen is a tool, it is easy to use the tool that is handy.
In order to do a good job in the adaptation of software, OPPO has also launched a gravitational plan to attract more software developers to enter the large-screen ecology and adapt to more applications. Its significance is by no means limited to OPPO's own products, but to promote the development of folding screens in the industry.
It is foreseeable that in the future, large-screen products will appear more and more in the eyes of consumers, and folding screen devices, as the leader in portability, will certainly be accepted by more users.
The folding screen is ready
There is no shortage of new forms of products in the mobile phone industry, but there is a lack of some eye-catching details.
Creases, firmness and ease of use are all problems faced by folding screens in the past. OPPO Find N came out later than the products on the market, naturally to solve the problem.
You can even see that in the reliability test, OPPO uses the test standard of the bar machine to verify the Find N. Whether it's a drop test at high and low temperatures or a six-figure bend test, find N has achieved the desired result, and it is the only product to receive the Rüinland Fold worry-free certification.
Some people say that OPPO's movement is too slow, and some people think that OPPO is too rigid in detail, but this is OPPO's insistence on product polishing. Folding screen was born in the hustle and bustle, but almost belonged to the "high-end toy", and today the folding screen once again came into people's eyes, in order to complete the leap to "common tools".
OPPO Find N is ready, it's no longer out of reach, it's no longer a toy.