Oppo shows us its rollable screen phone, the Oppo X 2021
We try Oppo’s X 2021 phone where the screen rolls out from inside the body.
Oppo has shown off its first rollable phone, the Oppo X 2021, and it’s impressive at first sight.
I spent hands on time with the X 2021 handset last week.
It’s different in its operation to the foldable phones that have hit the market by Royole, Samsung, Huawei and Nokia.
Instead of folding or unfolding the phone, you press a button to have extra screen real estate roll out from inside the chassis. Press it the opposite direction and some of the screen disappears from site.
It transforms from a tall but thin smartphone to a small tablet that’s nicely sized for showing wide-screen video.
It’s not exactly new territory for Oppo. In 2013 it produced a phone with a rotating camera, the following year a phone with a motorised rotating camera, and in 2018 released the Find X where the selfie camera is hidden inside the phone.
This was to overcome the issue of the notch, the little black area that contains the lens which became a problem when the borders or bezels around phones shrunk.
The secret to the X 2021 is a roll motor powertrain around which the screen wraps as it disappears inside the phone. There’s also a slider that ensures the display moves along a central axis as it opens and closes.
There is also a 2-in-1 plate designed to make sure the screen doesn’t collapse inward.
It’s impressive stuff but we have no idea of the durability of a mechanism like this over time. It’s one of the unknowns when you get a complex new form factor coming to market.
The rollable mechanism lets the phone ‘s capacitive OLED display stretch from a largish 6.7-inch smartphone to a smallish 7.4-inch tablet as needed. The idea is that you can enjoy a tablet experience without having to carry your tablet computer around. You just need your phone.
According to reports the rollable screen is made by BOE in China.
I found the phone simple to use. I could quickly move from operating it as a phone to enlarging the display, rotating it and devouring a YouTube movie in around 16:9 ratio.
Opening and closing the phone is a matter of sliding your finger up and down a button on the side. Sometimes the phone registered you doing this, at other times it didn’t respond. I kind of worked out the amount of pressure to apply so this worked more consistently.
I’d imagine this one of the small tweaks that Oppo will perform before bringing this phone to market.
And herein is the catch. It’s a concept phone at this time and not coming to market for now. So we can’t offer you a recommended price, or give you an idea of other specs such as the camera line-up, because this could be quite different on the version that comes to market.
Nor can we measure the processor power, graphics capability or battery life.
Indeed battery life will be important for this phone given the battery will be consumed when you open and close the screen mechanism.
Oppo’s director of global marketing and brand Michael Tran says Oppo has installed a large battery that doesn’t drain as the screen rolls in and out.
Mr Tran says the phone’s dimensions are 162 x 75 x 9 mm, it was not “heavy in the hand” at about 198 grams and runs Oppo’s variant of Android 10, ColorOS 7.2
According to china sources, the X 2021 has a MediaTek MT6853V 720 5G 8-core processor, a 5000 milliampere hour battery, a fingerprint sensor, and 128GB of storage, but any of this could change given the final version of this rollable is yet to be finalised.