180: The Era of Full-Screen Displays (Part 2)

"Do you think the front-facing camera ends here? No. Our Red Star Engineer said, since we've already made a pop-up structure, why not make it a bit more fun?"

The big screen scrolled, and the front-facing lens that had extended suddenly lit up. "That's right, our Engineer also added lighting effects to it. You can adjust the light color in the system settings, or turn the lighting effects off; it can all be configured."

"When we finished creating the lighting effects, our Engineer said again, 'Since we've already added lights, why not just add sound effects too?'"

"That's right, when the pop-up camera raises and lowers, you can choose sound effects. There are magic sounds that girls tend to like, mecha-style sounds that boys tend to like, and even sounds like the flute unique to our Huaxia. You can freely choose various sounds, or turn them off."

Chen Chen pulled down the notification menu on the phone, tapped it lightly, and the entire phone's screen appeared on the big screen on stage without needing a camera broadcast.

Immediately after, the content on the big screen split in two: one half displayed the screen content from within the phone, and the other half displayed the footage broadcast by the camera.

Chen Chen opened the front-facing lens. Accompanied by a sci-fi mecha-style sound effect and a flash of the top light, the front-facing camera popped out from inside the phone at an extremely high speed.

"Did you see that clearly? Do you want to see it again?"

Chen Chen held the phone, showing the front-facing camera to the audience in different sections.

"Isn't it cool?" Chen Chen raised the phone and shouted to all the audience in the venue, his tone filled with excitement.

"Cool!"

"Red Star is the coolest."

"That's awesome!"

It wasn't just Chen Chen who was excited; whether they were watching the livestream or were present at the venue, everyone was shouting with excitement. At this moment, Red Star had truly become the coolest company in the hearts of all its fans.

The atmosphere of the entire launch event reached an unprecedented climax.

"Have you noticed that the body of this phone seems a bit different from the phones of today?"

"Its surface has more luster and is fuller."

"What kind of body material should we choose to go with a phone like this?"

"Is it all-metal, or 3D hot-melt glass?"

"Neither. On this Full-Screen Display concept phone, we used a brand-new casing material."

"Our Red Star Engineer did something quite outrageous; they put ceramic material on a phone for the first time."

"An all-ceramic body!"

"That's right, the entire body is ceramic, including the back cover and the middle frame."

"Even the buttons on the body are all ceramic."

"We managed to make everything ceramic, except for the front panel of the phone."

"Do you know how outrageous this is?"

"When the Red Star Engineer told me about this idea, I was completely stunned. The Engineer told me that ceramic material is excellent; the new generation of microcrystalline ceramic is beautiful, crystal-clear, sturdy, and wear-resistant. It can achieve a hardness more than five times that of stainless steel, and the surface texture of the entire ceramic is as smooth as jade."

"The ceramics of our Huaxia have a heritage spanning thousands of years. It is both a very ancient craft and a modern process that modern industry cannot do without."

"This is a new material with a very classical aura that is also full of modern industrial style; microcrystalline ceramic is just such a new material that seems full of contradictions."

"However, the difficulty of applying this material to a phone body is extremely high."

"As everyone knows, Red Star is a company with an engineering culture, and I personally support some of the more whimsical ideas of our Engineers. Just like the bone-conduction toothbrush our Engineer made last time; if you all keep using that toothbrush as a speaker, I'm afraid Harman Kardon will send our Red Star a legal letter."

"When our Engineer started using this ceramic material, we realized just how difficult and expensive this process is."

"Take the ceramic middle frame on this phone, for example. Because its shape is irregular and the interior has to reserve space for our other components, its yield rate is less than 10%. This means that out of a batch of a thousand blanks, only a few dozen can actually be used. The cost of just this ceramic middle frame alone is nearly 1,000 yuan."

"Just this one middle frame—not including the buttons and the back cover—the cost for just the middle frame is nearly one thousand yuan."

"So, when we were making this phone, we didn't consider mass production or cost. We used the top-tier processes and top-tier technology to make this phone, almost without regard for cost."

"This is our determination in making a concept phone: to explore new processes and explore new technologies."

"After we fired the ceramic body and ceramic back cover, we faced a new problem. As everyone knows, the hardness of ceramic material is very, very high."

"Once the hardness is high enough, it makes it very difficult for us to connect the body and the back cover. Traditional gluing processes simply cannot connect the two together."

"We tried many methods and also tried using some connection processes that weren't mature yet, but they all failed. At that time, I even wanted to give up on using a ceramic body and wanted to continue using stainless steel or aerospace aluminum alloy."

"Later, one of our Engineers thought of a solution. He asked, 'Can we use the mortise and tenon technique from our Huaxia ancient traditional architecture?'"

"Mortise and tenon means no screws and no glue are needed; you just join them together with mortise and tenon. This type of craftsmanship has had a history of thousands of years in our Huaxia. Now, this ancient connection method has been applied once again in our concept phone exploring the future."

"Some might say, 'You've talked for so long, isn't this still just a concept phone?'"

"Did you Red Star actually make it?"

After Chen Chen finished speaking, he looked at the audience off-stage and the guest seats in the front row. Everyone had an expression of disbelief.