Sharp almost borderless smartphone, use screen for speaker

orangpelupa

orangpelupa

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S40INfI3Uxk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBLLwcoCgOM

O_O its 250 dollar. the spec has been announced but they did not mention how they will prevent the phone from easily breaking. Better gorilla glass?

It also use its screen as earpiece speaker in-call. Is that will make the call voice easier to hear in loud area?
 
How power efficient can using a laminated glass screen for a speaker really be? I'm thinking not very, but then again I'm not an engineer...
 
I don't think that using the display panel as a speaker would make that much difference to battery life in the end of the day. Sure, it probably uses a lot more power to induce vibration into a solid 5" panel than the usual membranes, but still it shouldn't make a substantial difference in battery life. Screen and SoC ought to spend a lot more power.


What I would be concerned about is privacy during phonecalls. Earspeakers are generally made for producing a weak sound with a "beam" projection (we wouldn't want the entire room to listen to our phonecalls), but this way it the entire screen panel will vibrate and I don't know how they would address this issue.
 
Flat "panel" speakers are by nature highly directional. If you are outside of their beam, you will hear virtually nothing. It's part of what makes designing flat panel speakers for home use difficult. I used to have a pair that used for an office computer. While the sound was good if the speakers were facing you, it was horrible and volume dropped drastically if they weren't directly facing you.

Regards,
SB
 
What I meant is that a laminated glass screen is probably very stiff and inflexible, thus naturally unsuited to being a speaker membrane...
 
btw why the phone so thick? its thicker than my 2 years old Xperia SP or my 3 year old (but lost) Samsung Galaxy el-cheapo (forgot the series).

is the screen-as-speaker took a lot of "depth" space?

EDIT:
i read somewhere that the screen vibrates and transfer sound directly to ear bones. So it seems it works like Google Glass speaker
 
"Thick"? It's like, what, 6mm deep or so? That's thick, these days? Does it really matter? You'd need the mother of all skinny jeans to not be able to squeeze that phone into them...
 
its 11m (1cm) thick, not 6mm. and the battery only 2000mAH. Usually phone that thick have crazy battery capacity. But this is not.

thats why i suspect the screen is thick.
 
its quad core at 1,2 GHZ. does android really that heavy?
im using xperia sp with dual core 1,7 GHz (downclocked to 1,5ghz) and it is snappy.

although i think the RAM capacity will be problematic. if they go with 3 GB RAM like OnePlusOne. It will be awesome.

my phone only have 1 GB RAM and i can barely multitask. At most, i only able to run 3 apps :( (and this is after using CyanogenMod. When using official sony rom i can only run 1 app O_O).
Ah i miss my symbian, where i can run dozens of app and it only have a few MB of RAM lol.
 
I find my S5 on the edge of being too tall, so the reduction in height for any future phones as well as any reduction in width is welcomed by me. I don't get the design mentality of the HTC One, Xperia Z(x) and iPhone 5(x). They're just too high/long.

That said, I would never go back to a phone that is more than 9mm thick. Around 8mm is preferable to me, with thinner being more desirable the larger the phone is in width and height. 11mm is cumbersome and chunky these days - not the mention that it seems pointless without having a larger battery to at least make use of it.

Every dimension matters to me. If x and y are made as small as possible but z is much larger than other phones with no apparent upside, I'm turned off by the form factor. Obviously there is a sweet spot for each where any further reductions make little difference for the related trade-offs, but most phones out now fail to meet this sweet spot in at least one of its dimensions unfortunately.
 
The 5" version uses the 1.6GHz version of S400 but unlike the other midranges it has 2GB of RAM.
Although this has a 5" screen, the smartphone is also quite a bit smaller than a Galaxy S4, so it's more in line with all the "Minis" of 2014. Also, the screen is "only" 720p.


There's another model in Japan being sold, the Crystal X, which has a 5.5" screen, but again the actual size is smaller than a Galaxy S5 because it's borderless in all but one side (less height, same width). It actually causes shame to the LG G3's proportions.
The Crystal X has a Snapdragon 801, just like every other 2014 flagship so far.


Silent_Buddha said:
Flat "panel" speakers are by nature highly directional. If you are outside of their beam, you will hear virtually nothing. It's part of what makes designing flat panel speakers for home use difficult. I used to have a pair that used for an office computer. While the sound was good if the speakers were facing you, it was horrible and volume dropped drastically if they weren't directly facing you.

Regards,
SB
Click to expand...

I had no idea about that. Thanks for the clarification.
 
Yeesh. Don't you people read posts properly? I mentioned the Crystal X and provided a link to the specs of the phone yesterday before everyone started complaining about the lack of a high-end version! :p

11mm is relatively thick for a modern phone (though still slim enough, IMHO), so I'm guessing that the lack of bezel and novel speaker technology cause a bit of extra 'thickness'. Neither phone is waterproofed. Perhaps not possible to achieve with such compact dimensions?
 
I think borderless phones are a bad idea. When you hold them, your flesh folds over and generates touches accidentally. It already happens occasionally to me with my thickish-border phone, and I'm a skinny dude, too. I can only image what fleshier hands would do when holding a phone like this.

Of course, Sharp could just gloss over such an issue by telling me I'm holding it wrong ;)
 
nd I'm a skinny dude, too. I can only image what fleshier hands
Click to expand...
do ppl get fat hands?
They must logically, its never struck me though
with what youre saying Im in complete agreement, give me a bezel, give me thickness on my current phone (nexus 5) I occasionally trigger an event just from holding the thing, with this I can see events triggered just from gripping it differntly in your hand
 
Mintmaster said:
I think borderless phones are a bad idea. When you hold them, your flesh folds over and generates touches accidentally. It already happens occasionally to me with my thickish-border phone, and I'm a skinny dude, too. I can only image what fleshier hands would do when holding a phone like this.

Of course, Sharp could just gloss over such an issue by telling me I'm holding it wrong ;)
Click to expand...


That might be a reason why the phone is relatively thick.
The thicker the phone, the less it "carves" into the skin, less skin will invade the screen.
 
I'm sure that holding a phone along its edges is sufficiently different from trying to tap or swipe from the edge of the screen that it can be very reliably detected as such. As long as manufacturers recognise it as a problem and put in some resources.

A simple solution would be to make the area of touch sensing smaller than the screen, though that might cause some false negatives as you're trying to tap/swipe from the edge. Better yet would be to expand touch sensing to the sides of the device. Not only would you be able to determine how the user is holding the device (information which could be used to adjust the on-screen UI), you could also support new gestures such as squeezing the device and swiping up/down the sides.
 
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