55: Glass material and heat dissipation

As the saying goes, technology is based on changing shells. The Soaring Cloud S2 can be moved down after the lifecycle of this year's red star 2 ends, fitting perfectly for the shining note series priced just over a thousand yuan. Meanwhile, the red star 3rd generation and Kunpeng mobile phone will continue to use the new Soaring Cloud S3.

Chen Chen personally participated in the development of the kunpeng phone 2nd generation's design, deciding to use tempered glass for the phone's back cover.

High-end products must look the part. It's not just about glass; flagship phones from my previous life often used nano-leather, which felt incredible. However, with current supplier technology, the production cost is extremely high, making it unsuitable for mass production.

Since artificial nano-leather is expensive and not cost-effective for mass production, why not just use real leather?

The Emperor Edition should look like an Emperor Edition. If we use something like Spanish top-grain calfskin, wouldn't a price increase of 1,000 yuan be reasonable?

It wouldn't be excessive at all!

Then we can release it as a limited edition. These tactics were overused in my previous life, but they are still effective now.

Look at 8848; they claim the phone automatically explodes if separated from the user by ten meters, and it's covered in top-grain calfskin. Even at such high prices, don't people still pay for it?

As for the future, with a Porsche design or a Lamborghini collaboration, the Kunpeng mobile phone series will have every opportunity to push its maximum price to the top.

As long as the price goes up and consumers are willing to pay, then the high-end status is truly secured.

The standard version will use tempered glass. After all, this material has its own advantages: high hardness, scratch resistance, better heat dissipation, and a better feel.

The only downside is that it breaks easily; that's just a characteristic of the material, and there's no way around it.

The previous nano-polymer materials were drop-resistant and had vibrant colors, but the weakness of poor wear resistance couldn't be overcome. Even with a coating, as the coating wears off during daily use, the plastic begins to age, ultimately affecting the phone's feel and aesthetics.

As for metal, it is lightweight, scratch-resistant, and has excellent drop performance. However, a well-known disadvantage of metal is that it blocks signals. Therefore, the all-metal design on the Kunpeng mobile phone 1 required antenna slots in the frame to allow signal penetration.

Starting from 2013, metal bodies began to become popular. While low-end phones were still plastic, high-end phones started switching to metal bodies, such as Huawei's M series and the Fruit series.

"Mr. Chen, are we really choosing glass for the back cover?"

Cui Yichen from the Kunpeng mobile phone design department looked at Chen Chen with surprise and disbelief after learning of his intentions.

After all, the mobile phone market is currently dominated by plastic and metal. Why did Mr. Chen suddenly take a retro turn and follow the Fruit 4s by using glass for the back cover?

Cui Yichen had originally planned to continue the metal body design for the kunpeng phone 2nd generation, but now that the chairman had intervened, he could only follow the boss's wishes.

"Metal is just a transition. Glass back covers are definitely the development direction for mobile phone materials over the next decade. This isn't being retro; it's called a tribute, understand?"

If it weren't for the fact that ceramic couldn't be produced yet, he would have wanted to use ceramic for the phone's casing.

It wasn't that ceramic couldn't be done, but the cost of ceramic made with the microcrystalline nano-zirconia process is currently quite high, and ceramic is relatively heavy. Chen Chen decided to use this brand-new material for a future new series.

Chen Chen didn't offer much explanation. Seeing their boss's serious expression, Cui Yichen's team could only follow Chen Chen's ideas.

After all, they were just employees, and Chen Chen now held absolute authority in the company, which was unshakable.

You can state your reasons and your opinions, but once Chen Chen makes a decision, it must be executed.

With the back cover settled as glass, the other key area Chen Chen needed to intervene in was the heat dissipation system.

The Soaring Cloud S3 still uses the same 28-nanometer process as the previous generation. In terms of performance, it mainly increases the clock speed. Combined with the need for an external baseband, the heat generation will definitely be greater than that of the Kunpeng mobile phone 1.

Over the next ten years, manufacturers will constantly struggle with heat dissipation. It's not obvious yet, but by the second half of this year, manufacturers using Qualcomm snapdragon will learn the meaning of cruelty.

The 'Fire Dragons' would get hotter with each generation; things only improved with the 835, but then the 855 and 888 were both major Fire Dragons.

Phone manufacturers also tried everything to innovate in heat dissipation systems, from increasing the area of thermal pads to copper pipe cooling, dual copper pipe cooling, VC vapor chambers, and even cooling back clips.

Some frantic manufacturers even installed cooling fans directly into phones just to unleash the processor's performance.

Consumers in 2013 hadn't yet fully experienced the beating from the Fire Dragons and didn't have a complete concept of phone heating. In fact, a hot phone isn't scary; what's scary is the 'cool-down period' after it heats up. Once it heats up, the CPU throttles its frequency, eventually leading to lag and crashes.

Manufacturers ultimately pay for these scenarios because a poor experience ruins the manufacturer's own reputation.

The kunpeng phone 2 uses the first generation of known heat dissipation technology. It's simple: emulate laptops by adding a copper pipe over the processor.

This copper pipe is also professionally known as a heat pipe. It's filled with a special liquid that evaporates to carry away heat when heated, and then flows back after condensing at the other end of the pipe, forming a cycle that exports the processor's heat to the body for dissipation.

This technology began development as soon as Chen Chen took full control of the company. It's not particularly advanced technology; it's just that current manufacturers haven't thought of putting it in a phone yet.

With these things settled, Chen Chen basically didn't interfere with other internal stacking. After the exercise of the Kunpeng mobile phone 1, Cui Yichen, the product manager, had made enormous progress. Chen Chen only needed to steer the general direction, and no major problems would occur.

If there really was a problem, at worst he'd be sent to the Africa business department for a few years of training, just like Wang Teng from Xiaomi. After the Xiaomi 9 turned out like that, there were rumors online that he was exiled to Africa, but isn't he back now to take the lead?

So, employees need training, especially in the Africa department.

Oh, I forgot, Red Star doesn't have an Africa business yet.

The company's overall business was developing steadily. Among them, the one Chen Chen was most concerned about, yet was developing the slowest, was the Xiao Ai smart speaker.

Currently, the system only had this one task, and Chen Chen guessed that once the physical Xiao Ai speaker was released, the Xiao Ai system would definitely undergo an upgrade.

However, progress was slow and could be described as extremely unsatisfactory. He originally thought making this wouldn't be particularly difficult, but the Engineers just shook their heads after seeing the proposal. Dr. Zhou even stated bluntly that if the intelligence was only on par with Fruit's Siri, it would definitely be a struggle this year.

For this project, Dr. Zhou specifically contacted his old classmate, Cheng Wenfei, who is currently working in an artificial intelligence lab in the United States, hoping to poach him to Red Star to lead the artificial intelligence project.