Early last year, Oppo was (one of?) the first company to ship a phone with a full HD display, on its Find 5. I bought one, and it became one of my favourite smartphones – a small Chinese company building phones with top-notch build quality, high-end (at the time) specifications, packaged in a distinctive and minimalist design.
A new year, and a new barrier to break – Oppo announced the successor to the Find 5 today. They call it the Find 7, and it ups the display game to crazy levels: it packs a 5.5″ 2560×1440 (!) display, the first of its kind on a phone (again, it could be one of the first). I honestly have no idea if it makes any sense whatsoever to have such a crazy display on a phone. Will it really make a noticeable difference over current full HD displays? I doubt it.
It further boasts a 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB RAM, and a 3000mAh battery. There’s also a Find 7 ‘lite’, which has a more traditional 1080p display, a slightly slower processor, and 2GB RAM. Unlike the Find 5, the Find 7 has a two features which I know will appeal to many OSNews readers: a removable battery and an SD card slot. Both of these features were added after requests from users.
Design-wise, the Find 7 loses some of the straightforward simplicity that I like so much about the Find 5; the phone is busier and messier, and the version with the crazy display has this fake carbon weave on the back that crosses into Samsung-tacky territory. The fancy elongated notification LED at the bottom is a nice touch, though.
All in all, the Find 7 is yet another noteworthy product from a Chinese manufacturer, and further proof of my conviction: Samsung, HTC, and other established players should be worried. I don’t think Apple will care much, but Android manufacturers should take note.
I like the specs of this phone, but 5.5″? It seems that phones with these kind of killer specs (Snapdragon 801/3gb RAM) would require me to invest in some clown pants just to carry the damn thing around. I’m not sure how big the Z2 is, but that hasn’t been announced for US, AFAIK.
Although the Apple haters are loathe to admit it, the iPhone is a much more impressive bit of engineering. Making an extremely compact smartphone with great performance and battery life is much harder than buying a monster-big screen and using the massive amounts of room behind it for the phone’s battery and electronics.
I have to laugh at the kids who are so impressed by these “phablets.” Modern smartphone are marvels of miniaturization, so a really big one is the opposite of impressive.
I’m willing to bet – 3 years from now, most apple fans, including you, will be doing their things using (a less impressive – that’s your wording) iPhone with a screen size of around 5″.
Are you willing to bet as well?
I’m not an “Apple fan.” I’m an engineer and a fan of good engineering.
What’s not impressive is creating a huge phone that fails to outperform a much more compact one. If Apple goes with a larger screen size, I bet that you will see much longer battery life and/or much faster performance than the competition.
But I never bet against people having low-brow taste and forcing the market down that path. Me? I want a phone that’s compact, elegant, and stylish. If I want a big screen, I’ll use a tablet like the one I’m composing this on.
Edited 2014-03-21 11:56 UTC
This (I can’t upvote you because I ‘ve already posted).
My 5-inch SGSIII already feels huge, I can’t understand people who buy 5.5-inch and 6-inch monsters.
I don’t know why this got downvoted. But I know why facebook and gawker don’t have a “downvote” button: to prevent the neckbeard patrol from downvoting to oblivion posts that violate their religion.
At first I thought facebook not having a downvote was a bad thing, but seeing how every post that contains the slightest opinion gets downvoted by the patrol units (fanboi patrol and neckbeard patrol, mostly the neckbeard patrol), it’s probably a good thing on a second thought.
In practice, forums/comments with a downvote (like osnews) are full of BS “neutral” opinion-less posts, as not to offend any patrol.
Edited 2014-03-21 18:58 UTC
Two reasons:
1. It’s ‘loath to admit’ and not ‘loathe’;
2. It’s a load of self-justifying old bollocks.
Hope this helps!
Grow up. Even you can’t be that immature and petty.
You can’t find flaw with my reasoning, so you act like a monkey throwing poo. You may not like facts when they don’t fit with your religious views, but that does not make them any less true.
It sounds like you know exactly why it got down-voted. It offended the religious views of some of the non-participants.
What I wrote is obviously true, so, lacking the ability to dispute the point, the neckbeard patrol down-voted it rather than disputing it.
I meant I can’t figure out which religious view exactly it offended.
But on the other hand, neckbeards have such complicated views and so annoying behaviour, I honestly don’t want to spend time to find out.
Now that the power of the downvote is being gradually stripped from neckbeards, what remains for them? Slashdot?
Edited 2014-03-22 10:02 UTC
Thou shalt not praiseth any product made by Apple. If a man praiseth an Apple product, you shall smite the blasphemer, voting down his words and casting scorn upon him, for Linux is our Lord and savior.
If Apple built a 3 oz. smartphone with 100 hour talk time and enough CPU horsepower to render the next Pixar movie, you’d still be voted down if you wrote anything positive about it.
I cannot understand why people are impressed by really big phones; it’s like believing that a 3 inch diameter wristwatch represents the height of watchmaking skill.
Edited 2014-03-22 10:44 UTC
Your assertions are trivially disproven by the existence (you might simply not be aware of them, living in your Apple-centric perception bubble) of other smaller than iPhone smartphones with comparable specs (for example among the Xperia Mini series of devices)
2560×1440 in a phone that will probably cost less than a monitor of 2560×1440…
I bought a 17inch laptop for 950euro with a worse screen than my 500euro phone.
That’s not really surprising. LCD matrix cost goes up with physical size a lot faster than with resolution.
So explain why most laptop low end desktop and low end TV screens are the terrible, good at nothing 1366×768 these days instead of 1920×1080 or at least 1280×800?
Edited 2014-03-20 03:17 UTC
Its call the dud production recycling. You were attempting to make a bigger 1920×1080 screen it has a few dead pixels around edge so you cut them off resulting with strange and nasty resultions. Cheep screens are made from LCD from the recycling bin basically.
Still doesn’t explain medium to high end laptops usually only coming with 1366×768 as the only resolution available to them.
Like I said already, the screens in these phones are above 500dpi, if thats the case then why not focus on making more high DPI displays then cut those down instead of continuing to make low dpi screens?
If yields where that bad then these phones would cost far more then they due simply due to the screen yields.
Windows is BAD, REALLY BAD with scalling.
Win32 is nightmarish with scalling.
And resoluton matter only up to given distance.
Laptop? You use it close -> see more details -> need more pixel per inch
TV? You use it from far away -> see LESS details -> need less pixel per inch
And yet if you plug in your PC and fire up the latest and greatest Crysis game you’ll still jack detail settings and up the anti-assailing settings to reduce jaggieness.
Increased dpi screens also help make older and odd resolution video content look better as there is less bluring of the image as the input resolution doesn’t match the display resolution and is stretched to fill as much of the screen as possible.
No need to explain, it isn’t true. Look at ultrabooks these days, they all have high res screens.
It’s largely because people don’t see and/or care about the difference…
From http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/blogbbctv/posts/how-to-get-the-best-out-…
…so, many people just don’t notice much of a difference between SD and HD – so much that they mistakenly believe they have HD, while in fact watching SD.
Evidently, the resolutions you whine about aren’t “terrible, good at nothing” at all… surely 720p must satisfy the needs and expectations of many.
Some more details from http://www.bva.org.uk/news-press-releases/choose-right-kit-world-cu… (via archive.org):
Edited 2014-03-22 21:01 UTC
Oppo is already beat, the Meizu MX4G is 2560×1536 @ 5.5″…
Yeah, It’s part of the reason the Desktop and Laptop market are “in decline”, a market that has reached saturation and products that are a downgrade from what you last bought are not going to help you sell more desktops and laptops.
IIRC AMD’s GPUs from the HD600 series onward all support a maximum display resolution of 16000×16000, Intel’s IGPs from the Haswell onward all support 4096×4096, so where is the screen with a 300+ DPI for the desktop or laptop market when phones have had them for years?
Where is the “Retina” 322dpi 15″ 4096×2560 laptop display?
Coming this summer: http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/19/toshiba-details-4k-laptop-arrivi… (apologies for Engadget link.)
As usual, the big question when it comes to phones (though 5.5″ for me isn’t a phone anymore) packing such dense screens – battery life.
As to whether that sort of resolution/pixel-density will be of any worthwhile use, there will always be people who claim they (and only they) can see the difference. Pixel-peepers are like audiophools. Make a cable out of nose-hairs and charge the ten grand for it, and they’ll still buy it, claiming they can somehow hear a wider soundstage.
640×480 ought to be enough for anyone…
The human eye can actually tell the difference, anyone’s eye, because the higher dpi reduces the jaggieness of the image and reduces the need for anti-assailing.
The backlight is the big power draw in screens, no the actual panel, so battery life would be comparable to screens of the same size, using the same backlight tech and the same panel tech.
I have a Galaxy Note 2 in my collection, and with its 1280×720 resolution, I have to take off my glasses and get as close as I can without my eyes crossing, before I can distinguish pixels. I also have a 7″ Kindle Fire HDX with 1920×1200 resolution, and no amount of naked-eye squinting reveals the pixels on it; I have to use a magnifying glass. While the Note 2 looks great in normal use, the Kindle looks absolutely astounding at a normal reading distance. It’s easily the sharpest, cleanest looking display I’ve ever seen on any device.
It’s not just the backlight; higher resolution means more video throughput, which means a beefier CPU and GPU are needed. That in turn leads to more power use, though it seems that every new generation of CPU/GPU is also a little more power efficient.
My old original Galaxy Note had a 720p resolution screen, my new LG G2 has a 1080p resolution – one. I couldn’t see individual pixels even on the Note, but I can definitely see a difference between text on it and on the new one, with text being much more readable on the LG-phone. The higher resolution is visible here and there elsewhere, too, with better, more distinguishable shapes and the likes, but it’s definitely with text that the difference is the most visible IMHO. This is to say, the jump in resolution was certainly visible and it did make a big difference in quality-of-life when using a smartphone, even if I couldn’t see individual pixels even with the previous phone.
On the other hand, going up from 1080p I doubt I’d see any difference anymore. I do honestly believe that somewhere around 1080p is past diminishing returns. I have not gotten around to playing with any phone with higher res yet, though, so it remains to be seen if I’m wrong.
Only when doing 3d. When displaying a video of the desktop the increased draw is negligible at best. Test it yourself on your desktop system, get GPUz or the like and change your display resolution and play back videos. Note how little of the GPU resources this uses even on the weakest of Intel IGPs.
Remember, in most cases these days the DSP is handling all of the video decode on your mobile device specifically to increase battery life and to reduce the load put on the CPU.
The GPU and CPU have a lot more stuff to do than just decoding and displaying video, you know? The higher resolution the screen the more pixels there are to push around and it does matter when you’re doing 2D-graphics, like e.g. UIs. Every time you power up your phone you ain’t looking at pre-recorded videos, now are you?
Also, your example of using GPUz or something to meter out resource-usage says nothing of power-usage. A system could use just 1% more resources, but power-usage could increase by 10% — they aren’t linked, they don’t linearly follow one-another.
Edited 2014-03-20 17:02 UTC
Methinks you, like many others are conflating TDP with actual power draw, a common mistake.
No, I do not.
Well, I know in Android 4.1 and higher, the GPU is drawing the screen at 60fps all the time. Engadget summed it up nicely:
“Project Butter lets the CPU and graphics run in parallel, rather than crash into each other, and has a big impact on both real and perceived speed: the entire interface runs at 60 frames per second on sufficiently fast hardware. Graphics are now triple-buffered to keep scrolling and transitions humming along, and the processor will swing into full gear the moment you touch the screen to keep input lag to a minimum.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/27/project-butter-improves-android-…
Color difference? Depends on distance AND sensitivity of given person.
Shaper difference? Depends on distance AND sensitivity of given person. (But this is different from color sensitivity)
So Yes, and No.
And BIG NO for putting “everybody” there. There are people with disabilities who have special needs, but there are many in between.
At that pixel-density? Questionable at best. The human eye does not have an infinite resolution
Edited 2014-03-20 12:45 UTC
All that pixel density can hide dead pixels.
True, but the more dense the panel, the stronger the backlight required. Also the more the gpu has to work to fill the screen…
What we have here is essentially new “resolution war” – just as we had largely pointless “megapixel wars” with digicam imaging sensors.
Edited 2014-03-22 20:52 UTC
The digicam megapixel wars were actually harmful to image quality. As the sensor pixels became smaller, the image got noisier and low light performance suffered.
The same thing happened with cell phone cameras, but Apple decided to limit the iPhone 5s sensor to 8 megapixels while increasing the size by 15%, giving larger pixels on the sensor, reducing image noise, increasing speed, and improving low-light performance. That’s why it’s considered to be one of the finest performing cameras in compact cell phones.
So, it seems it’s always about Apple with you…
I concur with Thom, Samsung and the others should be worried, I’ve have some of those in my hands, you can’t tell the difference, they are as fast, good looking and cheaper.
Edited 2014-03-20 04:38 UTC
I just want my phone to last a week of normal use. Sooner or later we will reach same point as PC market reached, where energy will be first priority: consumption – PC, consumption + storage – smartphones. Increase of resolution, CPU cores, GPU cores etc. we already had in PC and now, this cycle repeats with smartphones.
I think this is the next breakthrough. And I actually suspect it will be the focus for the next iPhone if they increase the size.
Apple has always focused on power efficiency. The iPhone meets the battery life of Android phones even though it has a far smaller capacity battery (1500mAh compared to 2600mAh in the Galaxy S4). So if they increase the size of the next iPhone, they will have a lot more room for battery and could make the thing last 4 days.
That is gonna be another disappointment for those who like to think that competition among Android handset makers is just a race to the bottom.
Soon we will have smartphone screens approach the pixel density of printed paper. The necessary compute power to push that high number of pixels leaves me worried for the battery life of the device though.
With that said, I’d love to get my hands on one of those.
And yet the vast majority of Android phones still being sold out there are using 2+ year old hardware and Android 2.x as most people are getting low end devices from companies like Cricket, Net10/Tracphone as Walmart or the bargain basement stuff from the big carriers plans sold at incredibly jacked up prices that are hidden as part of your “free” phone plan.
Phones like this one, the Galaxy, Nexus etc are all trying to get into the same market niche as the iPhone.
And even then you still run into the same problem that most Android phone users will only ever use the free version of an app.
Given that Google’s usage figures show over 60% of Androids in use are running 4.x, even a loyal Apple cultist like yourself surely must concede that you’re talking unmitigated shite there..? You’re so wrong it’s actually rather embarrassing.
Right… I must be an Apple cultists because I don’t take Google’s(a large for profit, publicly traded behemoth of a company in a hot market sector) numbers on face value and am instead going by what I actually see everyone actually using…
Get your head out of your ass, I’ve seen several devices that can’t even install the Play store even though they come with Android 4.1.
The Android market is a mess because Google never put it’s foot down about keeping systems updated like you see with the other mobile OSs. Unless you’re a rooting geek(which is a very small percentage of the user base) you are stuck with whatever the device came with and will use that till the thing dies or your plan lets you upgrade in 2 years, whichever comes first.
Also, FYI, I don’t own any Apple, Android Windows Mobile or Blackberry devices. I’ll stick with my old Symbian “brick” phone till the end of time thank you very much.
Edited 2014-03-22 06:29 UTC
Do you consider yourself to be “a loyal Google cultist”? No? Then take your childish “loyal Apple cultist” shite and shove it.
The first version of Android 4.x was released in October of 2011. Two and a half years later, well over a third of Android users still aren’t using a 4.x release? That’s pathetic.
iOS 7.x was released in September of 2013. Just six months later, 83% of iOS devices are running 7.x. 14% are running 6.x and only 3% are running earlier versions of iOS.
You just proved the other poster’s point.
Edited 2014-03-22 11:05 UTC
I refuse to buy a phone without a removable battery. Phone batteries tend to last 2 years, whereas I could see the tech inside these packages being useful for various things for 10 times that time. It seems so incredibly wasteful that non-replaceable batteries are so popular.
The battery in my iPhone 4 was fine after 3.5 years. Still got me through the day with pretty heavy use.
Just passed on an iPhone 3G that is now who knows how many years old (at least 6) to my mother in law. She uses it just for texting and phoning, but the battery lasts several days just fine. By the time the battery dies, the phone will be basically junk.
The iPhone 3G you passed to your mother in law can’t be “at least 6”, it launched in the summer of 2008… (and was sold way too long, as was typical with old Apple models)
Plus, I’m guessing it was in a drawer, unused, for the past few years – and Li-Ion batteries degrade much slower when they aren’t used, when they aren’t recharged constantly.
Edited 2014-03-22 21:36 UTC
OPPO looks like a nice find among current mobile giants. The prices for the hardware are reasonable and the specs looks nice. I would really try these phones.
I am more interested in that technique that supposedly extrapolates 50 megapixels from 13 megapixels.
http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/19/oppo-find-7-50mp-camera/?ncid=rs…
Does it actually work? Oppo showed samples (link), but they may be cherry-picked results. Let’s wait for the reviews.
PS: But generally, very good piece. And Samsung fans wonder why we were dissapoint from the lack of innovation in S5…
PPS: The 3000mah battery is also very interesting. It should set the bar for the bigger manufacturers.
Edited 2014-03-20 23:17 UTC
http://isthisretina.com/ shows that 2560×1440 at 5.5 inches makes it retina at or over 6 inches from your face.
The (light) version of this 5.5 in Oppo 7 with only 1920×1080 is retina at or over 9 inches.
I could see holding a phone 6 inches from your face.
For comparison, my Nexus 5 is 1920×1080 and at 4.95 inches becomes retina at or over 8 inches.
The human eye is not a high resolution camera. It actually collects streaming data from a continuously moving tiny area (about the size of a thumbnail at arms length) at an extremely low bitrate (20-30 BITS per second). This image is inverted and pseudo-colour. The visual cortex then uses past experiences to extrapolate the other 99+% of the missing information. We can “see” things that don’t exist and even completely ignore massive objects (such as oncoming cars directly ahead of us) that do exist due to this this process.
Maybe the display could be used for a VR helmet…