Chinese phone maker Oppo made headlines this week when the company unveiled a phone that’s just 4.85mm (about 0.19 inches) thick. Now rival Vivo might be preparing to launch a phone that’s even thinner.
The company shared an image of a new phone on social networking site Weibo this week. It shows a device that’s about half as thick as an iPhone 5S.
Since Apple’s phone 7.6mm, that means the new Vivo phone could be as thin as 3.8mm, or about 0.15 inches.
At the moment that’s about all we know about the phone. The company hasn’t shared any details about the processor, screen size or resolution, or other specifications. It’s also not clear if Vivo had to cut any corners to make a phone this thin: The Oppo R5 lacks a microSD hard and even headphone jack.
If the smartphone tech arms race of 2014 was centered around large, high-resolution displays it’s starting to look like 2015 could be the year of nearly paper-thin smartphones.
Honestly, there’s probably no reason phones need to be thinner than they already are. But super-thin phones certainly look pretty cool. Whether that’s worth the smaller batteries and other compromises involved in making an incredibly thin phone remains to be seen.
via CNET
Samsung is among my favorite because of removable battery and still incorporate SD card. Also the plastic backing can be replace for cheap if some how I drop it or have scratches on it. Now with Note 4 with aluminum case, its hard not to want one.
Boy I did I say that too soon! S6 and Note 5 changes my standing with Samsung. I did buy note 4 but I underestimate lagged touchwiz which annoy me to no ends. Now a happy owner of LG. Hopefully LG will take the crown from Samsung.
I love it. Ultra-thin may not be practical to hold, as many people point out, but these companies doing this are spurring innovation; it appears to be a friendly engineering competition among one another. This know-how will inevitably lead to thinner, more powerful tablets and notebooks.
First they took away the qwerty keyboard: “you have an on-screen keyboard”. As a result, when you typed something the remaining screen space became smaller than in the “dumbphone era”.
After that they started to make giant phones. Devices so big you could no longer put them in your pocket. As a result, you had to charge them twice a day.
A logical evolution would be bigger batteries. But no. We have the same giant screen with even smaller batteries! Fragile, unpocketable, barely good for a day. Oh, and say goodbye to the headphone jack (or music on the phone altogether in my case, because I refuse to use a Bt headphone). How is this progress?
Here is my proposal: we can now make pretty thin phones. Tone down the screen size a bit, let’s say 4.5″. A phone twice as tick as this one above is still pretty thin. But there would be space for a keyboard slider, so you can actually use the full 4.5″ screen. Also, the keyboard part should house the battery in full width, the main PCB can go below the screen. Also, please include the headphone jack and a microSD slot.
I suspect the “Will it blend?” catchphrase will be replaced by “Will it bend?”
This. ^
I was just about the say the same! LOL
Oh please just change that title to 3.8mm! 0.15 inches just sounds so horrible.
I don’t see all the craze over the thinnest phone. The difference is barely noticeable now, and you just cut corners. Who wants a thinner phone, when you don’t have headphones, micro sd, smaller battery, etc. It’s just not worth it.
This is the same nonsense that went on in the late 90’s-early 2000’s when they were miniaturizing cell phones, they were even predicting a future where phones were basically key chains, and then camera phones came out and they all quadrupled in thickness and size, as can be seen in the Nokia designs of the mid 2000’s. And now again, the entire supply ecosystem is degraded by the thickness nonsense. For example, camera manufacturers are focused exclusively on projects and OEM parts, that can fit a design under 8mm, which is absolute insanity. This obsession with satisfying the skinny jeans crowd, erodes the quality and functionality of all devices, by obstructing the perception of corporate higher-ups, as such as to convince them that every potential costumer out there, is a skinny jeans wearing, thinness crazed, fashionista, douchenozzle.
I hope they get down to 1.5mm and get it out of their system, so we can go back to seeing a myriad of function and performance focused designs.
That is quite an assumption to make. Although I do think phones are getting too thin, this is not due to the “skinny jeans wearing, thinness crazed, fashionista, douchenozzle” but rather because technology currently allows for phones to due so. The R5 may have a smaller battery compared to other Android OEMs, but compared to Apple, their battery size is fine. I was hoping that thinner phones could lead to revolutionary battery tech, which has remained almost unchanged. In addition, the 3.5 mm audio jack, although a standard, has been long dated. I personally never use it because I use Bluetooth earbuds, but the convenience of it there is still reassuring. However, if they were to make a new standard of USB that would allow for more than power and data transfer, it would be beneficial to consumers in the long run. Many flagships are twice the thickness and still have no micro-sd slot.
The same idiocy is happening about bezels. Having a bezel on a phone is a good thing to prevent accidental input.