Unlike the previous "hunting" and "showmanship", 2022 or become the "true fragrance" of folding screen mobile phones.
A screen that can be folded up makes smartphones more likely, and also provides an idea for manufacturers who are looking for new market flashpoints. According to Canalys, global smartphone shipments in 2022 will grow by only 5% compared with 2021, and the growth rate will be slower; and according to the report quoted by the Prospective Industry Research Institute, the shipment of folding screen mobile phones in 2021-2022 will grow rapidly from 5.6 million to 17.2 million units, a year-on-year growth rate of 2 times. So, does the folding screen mobile phone really represent the future?
Folded "body shape" and sometimes folded "experience"
Nowadays, although the stock of folding screen mobile phones is not much, it is not too new a concept in the technology circle. For the question of whether folding screen mobile phones can represent the future, the market has emerged two very different views.
Zhengfang believes that the folding screen scheme solves the contradiction between the large screen and the small body shape very well, and gives the smart phone more appearance design and interaction design possibility, which is undoubtedly the "next stop" in the development of smart phones. CITIC Securities released an in-depth research report on the foldable intelligent terminal industry at the end of 2021, reporting that "giants lead, multi-brand follow, and the folding industry chain is upgraded" and "folding is an important direction for the future development of mobile phones".
The opposing view mainly focuses on the dissatisfaction with the folding screen mobile phones that currently exist in the market, as well as doubts about the future market demand. For example, the smartphone big V "Thomas White" pointedly said: "In addition to the expansion of the screen, does the folding screen mobile phone bring other benefits?" Without. All that comes is a whole bunch of new problems. ”
Indeed, counting the existing folding screen mobile phones on the market, there are indeed a lot of problems: high prices, system mismatch, reliability and battery life, embarrassing screen proportions, obvious creases... Summed up in one sentence, many folding screen mobile phones in addition to folding the body shape of the phone, but also inadvertently folded the user's experience. Many users have spent a lot of money to show off, but found that this futuristic mobile phone is difficult to shoulder the responsibility of "main machine", in addition to cool does not seem to be practical.
The present does not represent the future, and the development of folding screens still needs to be considered in the long run
Looking back at the history of human science and technology, when many epoch-making new things first appeared, sometimes they were really not as good as old things.
On the streets of London at the end of the 19th century, cars with black smoke, loud roars and extremely slow speed became street monsters. And when the time spans 2 centuries, the automobile has entered a new stage of development.
For folding screen mobile phones, in fact, we can also put it to a longer time dimension to consider.
On the eve of the Spring Festival just past, Honor's first folding screen mobile phone, Honor Magic V, set off a lot of fluctuations, and it was difficult to find a machine on major network platforms for a while. As a mobile phone brand that has just been operating independently, why does Honor want to make such a mobile phone?
Fang Fei, president of honor product line, said such a sentence: "The previous folding screen experience was not good, but it does not mean that this direction does not work." We see this as a very promising direction for the future, and we are determined to do so. ”
In fact, the positive and negative views on folding screen mobile phones can be seen as different interpretations of the two perspectives of producers and consumers. Consumers starting from the current product, without getting the expected good experience, will cause doubts about the direction of the industry; and producers need to stand in a higher time dimension, to think about the real direction of each technology and innovation, leading the industry forward.
The folding screen "straightened" as the main machine, mobile phone manufacturers have done it
Looking at the entire industry, mainstream mobile phone manufacturers such as Samsung, Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, and OPPO have successively released folding screen mobile phones, especially this year, the new folding screen mobile phones have released frequent news. The unified force of these mainstream manufacturers undoubtedly points to a direction, that is, folding screen mobile phones may be the main force in the future.
This begs the question: What characteristics does a workhorse need to have? The fact is that everyone's need for "main force" is different, and game enthusiasts, performance control, face control or photo enthusiasts will have their own "main force" preferences. But for most people, the main work is convenience and practicality.
Folding screen mobile phones have been introduced for several years, the reason why they are more discussed as niche machines, as discussed above, its advantages and disadvantages are very prominent, so that it does not have universality. After several years of polishing, the outstanding shortcomings of folding screen mobile phones have been solved one by one, taking the Magic V launched by Honor as an example, which has brought good performance in terms of price, reliability, portability and UI.
The first is the price. The pricing of the Honor Magic V starts from 9999 yuan, pulling the price of high-end folding screen mobile phones into the range of 10,000 yuan, which has been the same as the price of some direct-screen flagship mobile phones.
Solve the price problem to see the user is most concerned about the practicality. Folding is the biggest highlight of folding screen mobile phones, but it is also prone to problems. At present, there are three main ways of folding the folding machine on the market: the earliest is the horizontal folding, that is, the screen of the flexible screen is folded in half, and the development state is similar to the tablet computer of the large screen. The advantage of this scheme is that it is cost-effective, but the disadvantage of the horizontal folding scheme is also obvious, that is, it is easy to damage.
The second is vertical inversion, that is, the ordinary size of the straight board mobile phone, vertically folded up to achieve the purpose of smaller storage body, somewhat similar to the previous flip phone - obviously this scheme pursues the direction of portability rather than large screen.
The Honor Magic V uses a third "horizontal inward fold" design. The horizontal folding scheme seems to solve the problem of life and damage of the external folding screen, but it also faces a series of problems such as weight, thickness and interaction between the inner and outer screens. In the face of these problems, Honor Magic V handed over a different answer sheet with independent research and development.
Honor Magic V design drawings
Hidden beneath the surface of many problems of the folding screen is a design paradox that involves the whole body. It is not wrong to add a complex hinge under the small fuselage to ensure the unfolding of the large screen, but the hinge occupies a lot of external screen space, so that the folding screen mobile phone outer screen becomes a long strip of the opposite sex, which is inevitable to put the cart before the horse. At the same time, the thickness and weight of the hinge also directly determine the thickness and weight of the whole machine, and put forward higher requirements for product design. Under the convergence of many problems, folding screen mobile phones often become an experimental product that takes care of one or the other.
Market research data shows that the use rate of folding screen mobile phone external screen exceeds 50%, and the external screen performance of a straight panel machine that cannot be compared is not enough to support the folding screen mobile phone to become the main machine.
Honor Zhao Ming said in an interview that the product is the externalization of a company's values. In the values of glory, user demand orientation is the first pursuit of products, and scientific and technological research and development is the guarantee of this pursuit.
Faced with the complex problem of folding screen mobile phones, Honor chooses to simplify the complexity. With the core clue of ensuring the most important external screen size ratio in user use, we have carried out scientific and technological research, and achieved a new height in the industry.
Honor Magic V ultra-thin suspended water droplet hinge
Honor first locked the golden ratio of the main mobile phone outer screen of 21:9 for product design, which brought great challenges to the hinge design. Honor independently developed the industry's first ultra-thin suspended water drop hinge, achieving the industry's thinnest fuselage thickness of 14.3MM, while the outer screen turning bezel from near the industry's 9MM to 5.61MM compression of the fuselage width, so that Honor Magic V in the case of ensuring the proportion of the external screen is still more than 90%, to find the screen space stolen by the hinge.
Honor Magic V large screen design
Under the orientation of user experience, Honor Magic V broke through the product form barrier of folding screen mobile phones as the main machine for the first time. Let the Honor Magic V not be much thicker than an ordinary straight-screen mobile phone when carrying it around every day, and it can be used as an ordinary straight-screen machine in a single-screen state.
Honor Magic V bending test
And for those concerns that cannot be confirmed for the time being, Honor also guarantees through extreme experiments: the team will measure the phone from bending, communication, heat dissipation and other aspects. After testing, the opening and closing life of the Honor Magic V folding screen mobile phone has reached 200,000 times, and it can also be used for more than 10 years according to the average number of opening and closing times of 50 times per day.
Honor Magic V outer screen drop scene test
If that were the case, it might still be within the normal range. But Honor's consumer demand orientation is definitely at the obsessive-compulsive level. Folding screen mobile phone is easy to damage, maintenance is expensive, maintenance is difficult to maintain is the industry has been the old and difficult problem, may be for many manufacturers, this is value-added service revenue, but for consumers often thousands of maintenance costs are indeed unbearable. Zhao Ming twice "angrily dropped" the mobile phone at the Glory Magic V conference, dispelling the last troubles of consumers. It is understood that the fall resistance of Honor Magic V comes from the innovative curved nano-glass-ceramic process, which is far stronger than the ordinary Corning Gorilla Glass panel, and the drop resistance is significantly improved.
Although Honor still bears the rumor that many technology research and development in the market rely on inheriting Huawei, we can see from the Honor Magic V that independent research and development has become the ballast stone for Honor to build innovative products based on high-end. Relying on scientific and technological innovation to create a "two-wheel drive" concept that constantly meets and exceeds consumer expectations will also become the core driving force for glory to move forward in the future.
"No sense", making the folding screen mobile phone really practical
The successful combination of software and hardware can bring 1+1>2 effect, Apple has proved. Also for folding screen mobile phones, the combination of software and hardware to give users a better experience can be qualified for the position of the main machine. From the perspective of hardware, Honor Magic V can fully assume the responsibility of the main machine, but what about software?
After the Android system was updated to version 10.0, it added support for folding screens. However, from the perspective of the actual use of the products of each manufacturer, the UI and system optimization of each manufacturer are still very different from the actual experience. In the early products, we saw many less mature solutions, such as some applications did not quickly switch to full screen after opening, and even appeared to be a flower screen, while most UIs did not design more usage for the open screen state.
For users, these bad experiences undoubtedly directly dissuade them from using the folding screen. And the really good "soft and hard" brings "no feeling". Under the empowerment of Magic UI 6.0, "no sense" is also the experience brought by the honor Magic V.
Honor Magic V multi-line watch the game
The first is the insensitivity of software adaptation. With the advantage of large screens, Honor Magic V has developed multi-screen interactive gameplay for many specific applications. For example, when you watch live events, sometimes you often encounter "dilemmas", but with Migu video on honor Magic V, you can achieve multi-channel video support for sports events, using multi-screen interaction to watch the live broadcast of two games at the same time, without missing every wonderful moment.
The addition of YOYO AI makes the Honor Magic V more "humane". For example, when you enter the subway station, it will automatically pop up the ride code, and you do not need to manually operate it. Similarly, there is intelligent perception in scenarios such as boarding, express delivery, and elevators. From these details, it can be seen that Honor's in-depth understanding and polishing of consumer needs can only be made to make a really useful and practical UI interaction, rather than "showmanship" - and this also provides a good reference model for the industry.
According to Fang Fei, the first principle of folding screen design is: "Can impress consumers." "Honor Magic V solves the dilemma of inefficient interaction of traditional folding screen mobile phones, and achieves a consistent, smooth and efficient interactive experience." At the same time, Honor also works with third-party manufacturers and the industry to build a folding screen ecology, bringing users the scale advantages of 100% large-screen adaptation of TOP100 applications and 90% large-screen adaptation of TOP1000 applications.
In the current mobile phone industry, folding screen mobile phones are still a minority, and the establishment of folding screen application ecology is not a day's work. To make folding screen mobile phones truly practical, so that it truly becomes the future of the industry, "soft and hard" is indispensable. The emergence of honor Magic UI provides a positive template for the improvement of the folding screen ecosystem, and has become an important symbol on the road to the popularity of folding screen.
Behind the "unobicipated" is the recognition of the market
After the listing of honor Magic V, "can't grab" has become the most feedback from many consumers, but it also reflects the market's recognition of this new product on the one hand.
As a new smart machine direction, the emergence of folding machines has made the industry appear a variety of possibilities, but also brought more challenges. The "folding screen into the main machine era" proposed by Honor Magic V really points out the problems faced by the smart machine industry. As a responsible manufacturer, when exploring this new direction and new possibilities, we must also adhere to the fundamental principle of consumer experience, not blindly pursue new and different, but use really easy and practical products to win consumers.
Honor Magic V
Back to the question at the beginning: does the folding screen mobile phone really represent the future? For now, probably no one can give a very definite answer to this question. However, the so-called one leaf knows autumn, through the case of Glory Magic V, we can more or less glimpse a little bit of what this future looks like in the present. It may not be so perfect at the moment, but I believe that as long as the industry works together to polish the hardware with a down-to-earth attitude and create a more perfect software ecosystem, then this future will not be too far away from us.
Editor-in-charge: Jiang Wenqi