Zhi DongXi (public number: zhidxcom)
Author | Yunpeng
Edit | Heart edge
Zhidong December 20 news.
Folding screen mobile phones have entered the public eye since the end of 2018, and it has been three years, but so far the annual shipment volume of the global folding screen mobile phone market is only about 3 million to 4 million.
Zhidong has also gone deep into the front line of mobile phone retail to explore the reasons, and the answers given by most consumers and practitioners are generally simple and direct - expensive.
Just last week, the domestic smartphone manufacturer OPPO released its first folding screen mobile phone OPPO Find N, when the price of 7699 yuan appeared on the screen, the press conference scene broke out a long applause.
OPPO Find N took four years of research and development, after many rounds of iteration before the final mass production, and this product is also the first blockbuster work of Liu Zuohu, founder and CEO of OnePlus, who returned to OPPO as chief product officer.
Can OPPO's folding screen mobile phone make the folding screen mobile phone "from early adopter to common use" as Liu Zuohu said? Oppo Find N can achieve "markless folding, free hovering" behind what black technology is hidden, it is worth digging deeper.
According to the current mobile phone industry chain information, behind the expensive price of folding screen mobile phones, the most important source of cost is the screen and hinge. For the folding screen, the screen and the hinge are actually inseparable, the folding method of the screen is determined by the hinge, and the structure of the hinge determines the process and form of the screen folding.
Liu Zuohu confessed that the main reason why they have been stuck on this product for four years is to solve the crease and durability problems.
According to my actual experience on the spot, oppo Find N new machine can hardly see the crease after the screen is unfolded, and from the crease alone, it is obviously due to the folding screen products of Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi and Motorola.
So how exactly OPPO does it, the hinge design is crucial.
Liu Zuohu revealed that the cost of this hinge alone is about 100 US dollars. The OPPO Find N hinge contains 136 parts with a machining accuracy of 0.01 mm, about one-tenth of a human hair, and contains 125 technical patents behind the hinge.
In an interview after the meeting, Liu Zuohu said that in fact, At present, China has been at the forefront of the world in this field of high-precision manufacturing, but the difficulty is how to design the hinge, and this design is the main thing OPPO wants to do.
After the hinge is folded, the screen fold presents a "water droplet" appearance, which can effectively alleviate the crease problem, but the structural complexity is much higher than that of the traditional hinge.
On top of the water droplet design, the hinge also realizes the function of free angle hovering of the screen, which once again increases the design difficulty of the hinge.
At present, in addition to OPPO, only Samsung's folding screen model in the industry has achieved screen free angle hovering, while other domestic manufacturers have not realized this technology, it can be said that OPPO in hinge technology, although it came late, but directly achieved the first echelon.
Speaking of hinges, it has to be mentioned that the screen, the folding screen of the mobile phone and the hinge are closely related.
The OPPO Find N is equipped with a Samsung top E5 AMOLED flexible screen, which is almost "to the top" in terms of screen parameters. In fact, at present, in the field of folding screen screens, Samsung is still faster than domestic screen manufacturers.
Also because of the cooperation in the screen, some insiders asked in a public interview whether OPPO Find N will be a "supply chain integration" product?
In this regard, OPPO related R & D personnel mentioned that the focus of supply chain manufacturers is very subdivided, such as Samsung's display department focused on screen technology, but he may not be familiar with how the screen works with the hinge. Similarly, hinge manufacturers can produce hinges, but how to better adapt to the screen and how to design are their blind spots.
OPPO's role is to overcome the core technical problems, the screen, hinge organic combination, which involves a large number of self-developed technology and patents, which is also one of the main reasons behind OPPO polished the product for four years.
Of course, in addition to the two major hardware technologies of screen and hinge, OPPO Find N also focuses on optimizing the software ecology, adding fast split-screen operation gestures, horizontal screen adaptation for mainstream applications, and further optimizing the operation experience of large-screen applications in details.
Overall, OPPO Find N is a product full of sincerity, which is not only an answer sheet handed over by OPPO for the first time to impact the folding mobile phone market, but also reflects OPPO's persistent pursuit of hard-core technology.
This product did not "shrink" in the experience because of the price of 7699 yuan, on the contrary, while the hardware specifications were the first echelon in the industry, there were many novel innovative ideas in software.
Soon, Huawei, Glory, realme, vivo and many other manufacturers will also release folding screen new machines, with the maturity of the supply chain, cost decline, 2022, may become the domestic folding screen mobile phone market outbreak of the "first year". Whether OPPO Find N can win the recognition of consumers will be tested by the market.