Foreign. Okay concept phones. The marketing machine strikes again. So all right.

OnePlus has been hyping up and teasing this concept phone with these images for the past week or so. By the time you see this, it's looking pretty spicy. It's got a lot of people wondering about it. Meanwhile, I've been testing the phone for about three weeks now.

This is the actual phone. Now again, the fact that it's a concept phone means it's not coming out anytime soon like it doesn't have any true parallel to a current. OnePlus Zone But it's meant to demonstrate something cool or unique that they're just not shipping. And so with this one, it's an active cooling system that they're calling Cryoflux Technology.

Active Cryoflux is what it says on the back. Uh, so you can see it I Think it actually looks super sick. If you look closely at the back of the phone here, you can see this icy blue liquid pulsing through these channels over the back and it's over the hottest parts of the phone. It's keeping the battery and the CPU and GPU cool.

And then it's around the camera bump too. You can see it up here flowing around this circle around the multi-camera system. I'm not sure liquid flowing around the camera bump would actively contribute to Cooling in a useful way, but it sure does look sick. It's hard to appreciate it fully on camera, but just holding it in my hands looking at it, especially if you go into a darker room, you can see these bubbles that make it clear that there's some type of liquid running over the back of the phone.

The only thing is uh, it doesn't work like at all like this. Like all the stuff that I said that it would be cool if it did like cooling a CPU and GPU and Battery It doesn't actually do that like it does have the liquid flowing through the channels to make it look like it's cooling things. but this doesn't actively contribute to the cooling in this phone. just looks like it does.

So this concept phone is designed to show the possibilities of what a working version of this could look like or maybe an exaggerated version of this could look like. But that's just it. It's just what it could look like. So okay, what if it did really work well OnePlus Told me that uh, they believe a future version of cryoflux that is actually working uh would reduce the phone's charging temperature by 1.6 degrees Celsius which would allow it to charge from zero to 100 up to one minute faster and reduce gaming temperatures by up to 2.1 degrees Celsius which could translate to an extra two to four frames per second.

And that's what they told me. So that's like. That's probably the absolute best case optimistic version of what they got in their testing. Basically, there's a good reason why this is showing up in a concept phone and not in an actual real shipping phone which is like this: adds a lot of complexity and potentially cost and thickness.

Obviously you have the liquid and the pumps and everything. Not that this is like a super thick phone, but it adds thickness all for not a ton of benefit. This is very concept phone thing to do like. We do have the Asus Rog phone and the Lenovo Legion dual I don't know if you remember that phone.

These are some of the only phones in the world that I've seen that have actually tried real active Cooling and even that was different. It wasn't cryoflux, it was like a fan accessory that plugs into the back. These phones sacrifice water resistance and thinness and their expensive Niche phones, but they did it. So why show this off if you're not actually intending on making it into an actual phone? you're going to ship and sell well.

The answer, like so many other things with a lot of these companies, is marketing right? So these companies do spend a lot of money on R D on research and development and they're constantly coming up with new ideas that get proposed and then mocked up and then prototyped and tested and adjusted. and a lot of these things end up making it into a phone, but the ones that don't they don't make it to the end. Maybe they just get repackaged and turned into a nice concept for people to admire their hard work. and then they don't actually make it to a phone.

It's kind of like how we're pretty sure we can be confident that somewhere in Apple's headquarters there is an iPhone with USBC just for testing. There's no way they haven't tested it yet at this point, but they're not going to turn around and and packaging it up and showing it off as a concept phone. It would be kind of funny if they did actually, but that's something they keep under the surface. But the companies that do this concept phone thing, this is really just about getting a little bit of.

PR Return Little positive marketing return for all the dollars that you spend on research and development that didn't end up making it into final products that you could eventually Market as if they were going to be in customers hands. which is fine. I Can't really be mad at that, but at the same time I'm holding like I'm holding a cool idea that's not going to be a real feature in a phone. So I put together a little list of concept phones just so you can see what we're working with here and I've put them in order of worst to best based on how much I wanted them to become a real thing.

So in 2020 OnePlus did another concept phone. They're no stranger to these. This is a phone with a color changing back. Uh, it could change colors for fun or even as a notification indicator using electrochromic glass.

the reason it never came to a real phone is because electrochromic glass is insanely expensive and difficult to make efficient in a tiny smartphone. But your phone could change colors. Then this year there was a Xiaomi concept phone based on the 12s Ultra that let you attach a physical like a lens to the back of the camera system on the phone. Cool idea to be able to attach and use different high quality lenses for different focal lengths on the back of your phone, but the fact is you're still extremely limited by the one inch smartphone sensor underneath and by the time you put all that extra Hardware up and you're carrying around several lenses, most people would rather just carry a regular good camera that's going to take great pictures with a larger sensor anyway.

then there's TCL TCL Also is no stranger to console phones and they brought one to CES this year with a paper-like matte display. This is kind of interesting. It's like a Kindle kind of cool idea. I Actually love the thought of having a full color but fully fingerprint lists and reflection free display on a phone.

Uh, but this one isn't coming to a real phone either because well, TCL isn't sure if there's going to be enough people interested in it and also people who actually got to use it. Also noticed the Finish does take a big hit to the brightness overall and there will also be some durability questions too. With a normal smartphone with regular glass, you can go to Corning and buy their best hardest strongest Gorilla Glass and that's typically fine, but with this you couldn't buy some off-the-shelf strong glass so you don't know. It might be a little bit brittle.

it might be a little bit scratch prone. That's the type of thing that they're worried about now. Vivo did a concept phone in 2019 with no buttons and no ports. It had thick pressure sensitive areas around the body and Pogo pins for charging and data instead of a port.

That's not what I liked about it though. What I liked was it also had a full screen under display fingerprint reader. So instead of it having to be in this like specific area right in the bottom of the Middle where you have to nail it every time might take more than one try on this concept. You can literally unlock with your fingerprint by just touching anywhere on the screen which is kind of crazy.

This is an evolution of what they did back with the first Apex concept phone which was in 2018 which was a bezel-less concept with a pop-up camera and a half screen fingerprint sensor. I Just like the idea of being able to add more than one finger at once for extra security. That would have been super sick. But yeah, an optical sensor that big is extremely extremely expensive.

Way too expensive for a phone now. OnePlus Also did a concept phone at CES 2020 that I thought was really interesting. It used electrochromic glass again so hey too expensive but this time is to darken or lighten just the glass over the rear camera and it was cool. It could hide it if you went all the way dark and it had this Sleek look but also it could be used as a sort of an ND shade for reducing the amount of light that gets in.

so taking pictures Outdoors or in bright light again it would have been cool to see but that Tech is just not efficient enough to miniaturize and put in smartphones right now so that McLaren Edition concept phone is never going to happen. And then maybe the most interesting concept phone of them all is the all these the foldable rollable crazy stuff that we've seen from several companies. So TCL did a fold and roll with like an accordion hinge back in the day when that was the only way anyone knew how to do it. Motorola though did a rollable concept phone that actually extends its height from the top like a match trick and LG did a rollable phone that extended in the landscape Direction rip to LG but all these Concepts you guessed it never shipped or never turned into real phones or real products of course for various reliability and cost reasons that make perfect sense.

So at this point it feels like we have the formula for how a concept phone is born. Like how A Star is Born in the universe which is like, all right, spend a lot of money on research and development and various ideas will make it all the way through the prototyping stage and get into the final product. which is cool. Some of them won't make it quite to the end, but we can still repackage them into a concept phone and show off how cool it could be.

And I guess on one hand, I can't really be salty that they're spending a lot of energy on new research and development. It's cool that we get new ideas, but then also yeah, concept phone kind of just a just a PR stunt at the end of the day. why not both? Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one! Peace.