179: The Era of Full-Screen Displays (Part 1)

Chen Chen looked toward the audience.

There were no cheers, no screams; everyone was staring at the peculiar phone screen on the display.

"This is already the limit of what our current technology can achieve."

"Its front panel is almost entirely screen."

"This is a brand-new design, a concept phone designed and built based on Red Star's vision for the future form of mobile phones."

"We have given this form of phone a name: Full-Screen Display."

"Which means the entire front is a screen."

"This is the direction we are exploring."

"One of them."

"The top bezel of this concept phone is 1.7 mm wide, and we have also perfectly controlled the width of the left and right bezels to 1.65 mm. The extremely narrow bottom bezel, hidden in the shadows, is only 3.2 mm."

"By exercising extreme control over the phone's four bezels, we have achieved a stunning 95.4% screen-to-body ratio in this first phase."

"This screen-to-body ratio is the highest record on this planet; currently, no other phone manufacturer can produce a phone with such a screen-to-body ratio."

"The Apple phone, which currently has a single-model sales volume exceeding 150 million units, has a screen-to-body ratio of 68.9%."

"But that is a phone from a past era. I believe that in the next ten years, the form of mobile phones will definitely look like ours."

"The screen-to-body ratio will get higher and higher, constantly approaching 99.9%, until it fills the entire front panel."

"When this phone was truly made, we all said, 'Such a cool phone, shouldn't we give it a cool name?' We discussed it for a long time and felt that no name could describe the shock of seeing this phone for the first time."

"Our CEO Lu said, 'Since it cannot be described by a name, let's just call it the X Phone.' The 'X' is taken from the first letter of our Red Star's 'Xing,' and it also represents the future and exploration."

"Over these past two years, our exploration of the Full-Screen Display has not been a simple matter."

"Perhaps everyone just saw our phone and thought it was very simple; isn't it just removing the forehead and chin? What's so hard about that?"

"But actually, what I want to say is that this is a brand-new form of mobile phone. It is different from all the phones we currently have; it has no forehead, and it no longer has the two holes and the earpiece on the forehead."

"You can't even find a front-facing camera on our Full-Screen Display concept phone, so where did they all go?"

"If the earpiece has disappeared, how do we make and receive calls? Wouldn't this Full-Screen Display phone just become an MP4?"

"Actually, the earpiece hasn't completely disappeared; it has just been hidden by us, and it's just hard for everyone to notice."

Chen Chen scrolled the large screen, and a magnified view of the top of the phone appeared. "After zooming in, we can see that the very thin horizontal line at the top is our earpiece."

"Holy crap! It's hidden there?"

"This, this, this... how was this done? How can the earpiece even be hidden?"

Like many of the audience members off-stage, the viewers watching the live stream were also filled with shock. The earpiece was just hidden like that?

If it hadn't been magnified, it would have been impossible to discover.

"Our Full-Screen Display concept phone uses a micro-earpiece."

"Then some classmates might say, 'You say it's a micro-earpiece, but what if we can't hear the sound when making calls? What if the sound is too quiet and affects the call quality?'"

"Actually, micro-earpiece is just a simple term; its full name is Back-Fold Conduit Micro-Earpiece."

"We spent two years completely redesigning the original earpiece, using a design structure called a conduit type. We placed the diaphragm sound-generating unit under the screen, which is in the structure of the back of the phone, and transmitted the sound to our top sound outlet through a sound-conducting structure, which is a hollow channel."

"It can be said that this structural design perfectly hid our earpiece."

Immediately after, a line of text appeared on the large screen — The proximity sensor has disappeared.

"The proximity sensor is a very small thing, but it is very important. The original proximity sensor used an infrared method, which required opening a black hole on the phone body. We have now changed it to an ultrasonic proximity sensor, which emits ultrasonic waves directly from behind the screen."

"Also, where did the front-facing camera go?"

"At the beginning, when we were designing this phone, we planned to just get rid of the front-facing camera, thinking that not that many people like taking selfies anyway."

"Anyway, our company is full of tech geeks who basically don't really use the front-facing camera."

"Later, our Engineer dug out a Red Star Mobile Phone from over a decade ago from the warehouse and said, 'Why don't we just design the phone camera to be detachable (as written in Chapter 1)? Plug it in when you need it, and pull it out when you don't.'"

"That still wouldn't work; what if you lost the front-facing camera?"

"You can't have someone call you on video, and when you answer, it's just a black screen, and when they ask you what's wrong, you say, 'My front-facing camera is lost,' right?"

"We can't do without a front-facing lens, and a detachable design won't work either. Our Engineer thought and thought, and said, 'Why don't we just make the camera a mechanical structure?'"

"When not in use, it hides inside the phone, completely not affecting the aesthetics of the front panel. When you need to use it, just pop it out, right?"

"The first version of the prototype used a manual mechanical structure. You would click a small button on the bezel, and the front-facing camera would pop out from the top. When not in use, you would press it back in by hand."

"This manual structure was very unstable and also quite cumbersome for daily use, so we redesigned an automatic pop-up structure."

"And thus, we have our hidden electric pop-up camera. Everyone, please look at the large screen."

"The principle of the pop-up camera is that there is a micro-motor inside. When the motor is powered and rotates, it drives a lead screw to rotate, and the lead screw pushes a slider on a secondary rod to move, thereby achieving the lifting control of the camera."

After the animation demonstration was finished, thunderous applause erupted throughout the venue; everyone was shocked by this ingenious design.

"You can even do that?"

After the applause died down a little, Chen Chen continued, "Perhaps some classmates are worried that since this Full-Screen Display concept phone uses a pop-up camera, will this pop-up camera module have longevity issues? Will the extension and retraction speed be very slow?"

"I am telling you all here, absolutely not!"

"The design lifespan of our pop-up module can reach 300,000 times, which means that even if you use it 100 times a day, our module can still be used for ten years."

"As for the pop-up speed, everyone doesn't need to worry about this either. We measured its pop-up speed to be 1.1 seconds, which means that when you start the front-facing camera, it only takes 1.1 seconds for it to fully extend and start working."