The Honor Magic 2 raises a future of mobile without frames, without notch and with deployable cameras.
At IFA 2018, some companies try to lay the foundations of the technologies that will accompany us in the near future with products like the Honor Magic 2. This Chinese manufacturer gave some touches of its future device, not yet available, and in it we see three unique trends consolidate.
These ideas are actually interrelated. The first consists of have a screen without frames, something that actually has those other two consequences: getting rid of the notch and hiding the front and rear cameras with a system that is activated with our hand, not with a motor.
That the entire front is a screen
Actually that is the fundamental difference in a concept that we have already seen in the Oppo FInd X and the Vivo NEX. Both devices have fronts in which the use of the screen is especially remarkable (93.8% and 91.24% respectively), and in Honor they want to orient their Magic 2 to that goal.
At the manufacturer’s presentation, we were able to learn more about that new Honor Play, a gaming-oriented smartphone that in fact had already been presented in June, but it was the Honor Magic 2 the one who stole the limelight although this manufacturer hardly gave technical data about the device.
Yes indeed: will be the first device to integrate a Kirin 980 processor manufactured with 7 nm technology (quite an achievement), and they also indicated that this mobile will have a “super fast” charging system that will support powers of 40 W.
In this terminal, both the cameras and the upper speaker for calls are integrated into a mechanism that is deployed with a user action: it is not a motorized system like the Oppo Find X or the Vivo NEX, and that is one of the clearest differences of this device with those alternatives.
It will still take us two or three months to get to know it up close, but the Magic 2 certainly raises that future again in which mobile phones will take advantage of the entire screen and with it they will have to devise solutions to hide the front camera and, perhaps, the rear with mechanisms like the one mentioned.
In the teaser trailer for the Honor Magic 2 that was shown during the presentation there was another interesting detail: the presence of a voice assistant referred to as “Yoyo”, and that as in other cases, it responded to the user’s call with a female voice.
Sacrifices for the future
The question posed by these devices, of course, is whether users will end up accepting that to take a selfie (and maybe a photo with the rear camera) those systems have to be activated —Manual or motorized— that deploy these cameras.
In fact, that is one of the main doubts that arise when talking about smartphones that sacrifice that immediacy and availability of cameras to win in screen area. That favors the visual experience and is also an advance in design, but for this we must sacrifice those components that manufacturers must now hide.
That It also affects other practical elements such as the fingerprint sensor, which most manufacturers have relegated to the rear for those almost frameless designs. Some have begun to offer facial recognition as an alternative, but that option does not seem practical when we have before us a mobile whose front camera is natively hidden.
In that section, the fingerprint sensors under the screen – like the one in the Vivo NEX – may be the solution. Time will tell how manufacturers deal with these trends, and in fact it will be in 2019 when we will probably see what ideas ended up coming together and which ones did not.
In Engadget | Frames are not cool: why your next mobile is probably going to have an 18: 9 screen
