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Cellphones Displays Technology

Xiaomi's Mi Mix Alpha Has a Display On the Front, Sides, and Back (theverge.com) 55

Posted by BeauHD from the concept-phones dept.
The latest phone in the Xiaomi Mi Mix series is the Mi Mix Alpha, a $2,800 smartphone with a "surround screen" that wraps entirely around the device to the point where it meets the camera module on the other side. "The effect is of a phone that's almost completely made of screen, with status icons like network signal and battery charge level displayed on the side," reports The Verge reports. "Pressure-sensitive volume buttons are also shown on the side of the phone. Xiaomi is claiming more than 180 percent screen-to-body ratio, a stat that no longer makes any sense to cite at all." From the report: The Mix Alpha uses Samsung's new 108-megapixel camera sensor, which was co-developed with Xiaomi. As with other recent high-resolution Samsung sensors, pixels are combined into 2x2 squares for better light sensitivity in low light, which in this case will produce 27-megapixel images. There's also no need for a selfie camera -- you just turn the phone around and use the rear portion of the display as a viewfinder for the 108-megapixel shooter.

As for the phone's more traditional specs, there's a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ processor, 5G connectivity, 12GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, 40W wired fast-charging, and a 4,050mAh battery. That last spec would perhaps suggest that Xiaomi doesn't imagine you having the whole screen turned on all the time. Xiaomi describes the Mix Alpha as a "concept smartphone" and isn't going to be mass-producing it any time soon. The phone will go into small-scale production this year and go on sale in December for 19,999 yuan, or about $2,800. The original Mi Mix was also given the "concept" label and released in small quantities, with the Mi Mix 2 following a year later as a more mainstream device.
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Xiaomi's Mi Mix Alpha Has a Display On the Front, Sides, and Back More

Xiaomi's Mi Mix Alpha Has a Display On the Front, Sides, and Back

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  • a $2,800 smartphone with a "surround screen" that wraps entirely around the device to the point where it meets the camera module on the other side

    Can't wait to drop that and watch it shatter.

    (Now someone who actually read the article will tell me that it's shatterproof.)

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)

      by infolation ( 840436 ) on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @06:13PM (#59232178)
      Next up: the Apple 'iSphere' and the Samsung 'Mobius Strip'.

      • Plus, you will need a special grip to handle this Xiaomi phone in public if you're trying to keep your stuff confidential. In short, you will need to hold it right.

    • Try not dropping your phone.

      • Try not dropping your phone.

        It would be easier to move somewhere with no gravity.

      • If only there were flexible, resilient materials suitable for shock-absorbing protective cases, which were also transparent. Oh, wait - they've been around for 80-odd years, with a considerable industry devoted to coming up with just the right formulation for particular needs.

        Wrap-around screen ... paint me unconvinced. If I'd got eyes in my fingers, maybe. This looks to me like a solution in search of a problem.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      Can't wait to drop that and watch it shatter.

      You could always put it in a case... oh, wait.

    • What concerns me is the usefulness and battery life. What possible benefit could a screen like this provide and how much more power is it going to need to burn on the display?

      This is a mobile phone company that has run out of ideas.

      • What possible benefit could a screen like this provide

        You'll be the center of attention.

        (and yes, people build careers on that...)

      • This is a mobile phone company that has run out of ideas.

        I'm not sure that's right. This looks like a phone company that is throwing everything it can think of at the wall to see what sticks.
        Don't get me wrong, I think this particular idea is too mad to work, but it is something different.

        • You're right. I should have qualified that as:

          "This is a mobile phone company that has run out of reasonable ideas."

          • "This is a mobile phone company that has run out of reasonable ideas."

            Unlike Apple that has run out of ideas. period.
            And Samsung that has run out of ideas they can actually build.

            • Apple is being fairly sensible, making practical and evolutionary updates to their phones. I don't think anything is wrong with that.

              Samsung is taking a bit of a risk with the Galaxy Fold, but I can see the appeal for some people even if it's not something I'm interested in.

              This Xiaomi phone though, I'm not sure what it's for or what they were thinking when they made it. Perhaps it is just a phone for attention seekers as someone else stated above.

              I'll probably be sticking with my LG G6 for some time to com

          • I can agree with that. That phone is mental.

    • (Now someone who actually read the article will tell me that it's shatterproof.)

      Users, uhhhh, users find a way.

  • Shoot, just more "glamour" for the stylish set. More gimmicks. Just a flexible screen wrapped around the outer shell. Hey, your money if they release something like this, but to me, it's just another gimmick to over charge consumers.

    • No, the price is perfect to keep the plebs away. This phone is obviously catering to the Chinese upper class as a status symbol, so they might as well price it out of reach for normal people.

      Xiaomi describes the Mix Alpha as a “concept smartphone” and isn’t going to be mass-producing it any time soon. The phone will go into small-scale production this year

      They know only a few people can afford it (or will willing pay for it), but it's probably more about recouping some R&D costs, maybe with some desire for marketing thrown in.

    • For what hard work do they deserve a 2700% profit margin exactly?

      Because I actually have to work for every dollar in my pocket.
      I can't go to my boss, and say "Yo, I'll be working 1 hour a day, but you're gonna pay me for 27 hours an day. I have an obligation to my board and investors (wife, kids, etc), to make as much money while delivering the least effort possible in return. I'm sure you understand."

    • Xiaomi has a history of releasing limited quantities of ultra high end phones at high prices. A year later, they tend to release similar phones on mass scale that undercut the cost of competitor phones by $300-$400 US. It's not the worst strategy. They get a high-end phone out there with the rich crowd to test the market and see how it performs before they have to come up with a way to cost effectively build the device on a massive scale. Meanwhile, the rich crowd are out there with those limited editio

  • I'm just a small town-lawyer.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 ) on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @06:20PM (#59232188)
    Now, I'm just a small town lawyer but it seems to me that due to the nature of light, and reality, I can only see one fucking side of the phone at a time. Is this a phone for people with X-ray vision like Superman who can somehow superimpose, mentally, the image being displayed on the far side of the phone onto their field of vision next to the visible parts of the phone?

    • No, you're supposed to use it with your selfie stick mirror.

    • It's not for you, it's so that other people around you can see how much money you can waste. Welcome to the future, it's as dark as we imagined.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      Now, I'm just a small town lawyer but it seems to me that due to the nature of light, and reality, I can only see one fucking side of the phone at a time

      Most developers seem to want 3 or 4 monitors, even though the nature of the human eyeball is that they can only look at one at a time. I guess the feature is (1) an eyeball dart is quicker than using mouse/keyboard to switch windows, (2) they don't like to rearrange their windows, (3) they like to use peripheral vision to notice if something changed.

      I'd be pretty excited about two sides of a phone! I'd use it to take photos of children. I'd be able to see a preview on my side, and they'd be able to look to

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Dinjay ( 571355 )

      The images in the article indicate that the phone seems to detect which side is facing up when in a horizontal position and only light up that side.

      The real smarts would be when the phone whether the phone would be able to detect which side to light up when in a vertical position. This is conceivably doable using face detection and/or hand orientation detection, but it might be tricky to get it right.

    • The first $2500 of the price covers using an engineered virus left over from one of those optogenetics experiments to splice light-sensitive proteins into your phone-using hand. It takes a few weeks for them to build up to useful levels and your nervous system to adapt; but soon you'll be able to 'feel' activity on the screen sides facing away from you. Pretty cutting edge, hasn't caused cancer yet.

  • Didn't we just see a story a few days ago talking about how smartphone prices had plateaued and/or were starting to come down?

    The tech looks pretty cool, I will admit. But I'd be too nervous to use the thing.

  • I see all phone manufacturers trying to cram more and more useless features in their phones, yet none of them mentions one simple thing:
    Quality of sound in voice calls.
    There is a thing I tend to use my phone for, and that is (wait for it !) - To make phone calls! Can you believe it ? Actual phone calls. In which my voice is converted into electrical signals, transmitted to another device that converts it back to sound waves, yep, all that.
    Most phones have pretty appalling sound quality in voice calls and I

    • PSTN is band-limited (Score:4, Informative)

      by tepples ( 727027 ) <.tepples. .at. .gmail.com.> on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @09:00PM (#59232502) Homepage Journal

      Most phones have pretty appalling sound quality in voice calls and I would gladly pay more to hear the other person clearly.
      Yet this is the one aspect that all phone manufacturers neglect.

      Even analog land lines aren't perfectly clear. Part of the reason is that the public switched telephone network limits voice signals to 300-3400 Hz bandwidth, which (for example) cuts out most of the energy in the /s/ sound. Even a lossless codec can't circumvent this for calls to and from land lines or to and from subscribers to carriers that don't support HD Voice. Perhaps the most reliable way to ensure HD Voice is to have both sides of the call subscribe to a data plan (or be on Wi-Fi) and use an app other than the phone's default dialer.

      • The sound quality is galaxies ahead.
        Finally no hard to understand conversation partners anymore.

        The Opus codec delivers perfect hifi sound quality if required. And is optimized precisely for this sort of thing. (Normal voice call operation takes about. 80kb/s. Yes, kilobit. Wich is more than GSM and aLaw/uLaw of course, but you get what you "pay" for.)

    • There are definitely handsets that deserve much of the blame, sacrificing mic and speaker placement and size for more screen; but they all face constraints on the Telco side unless the stars have aligned to get you G.722 support or the like.

      If the quality is trash in standalone audio recording and playback, definitely blame the phone. If it is trash in a couple of VOIP scenarios run on high quality connections, almost definitely blame the phone for a slightly more subtle issue. If it only sounds like 20

  • If it's virtually all of it is a touchscreen, how the hell are you supposed to hold it without triggering or activating stuff? Or is one side just a screen with no touch capability?

    • Oblig (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You're holding it wrong, grandpa

    • Lots and lots and lots of courage!

    • It looks like the sides can have buttons for volume and camera shutter, but are otherwise blank (or at least just background).

      I would guess side touch would only work where a button was specifically placed. Much like my current phone except you can't feel where the button is (practical!).

    • The voice assistant has a built in trigger warning function. Just warn it before you touch it in any way and negotiate which surfaces count as touching for the purpose of a given use session. Easy.

      • The voice assistant has a built in trigger warning function. Just warn it before you touch it in any way and negotiate which surfaces count as touching for the purpose of a given use session. Easy.

        So, "no means no" and I can only fondle it with explicit permission?

    • Apparently it has software to distinguish purposeful touches and just blocks everything else.
  • Show me a video that is not CGI first, then I'll start to pay attention.
  • I'll admit, Xiaomi, you have me intrigued: the phones I've had to make do with in the past simply haven't been delicate enough; and tend to feature a disgusting number of surfaces that can actually survive modest impact.

    Can you go any further with this bold concept, though? Maybe just have the accelerometer watch for falling conditions and automatically discharge the battery through the SoC to assure the high standards of fragility I crave?
  • Nobody else turn their phone upside down when going to bed?

  • A 13MB GIF at the top of the page? Fuck you, The Verge.

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