ZTE Launches Axon M, a Foldable, Dual-Screened Smartphone (theverge.com) 61
ZTE's new Axon M is a full-featured smartphone with a hinge that connects two full-size displays, making the Axon M a flip phone of sorts. "Its front screen is a 5.2-inch, 1080p panel, it has last year's Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 20-megapixel camera," reports The Verge. "But flip the phone over and there's an identical 5.2-inch display on the back, making the Axon M anything but run-of-the-mill." From the report: The M's hinge allows the rear screen to flip forward and slot right next to the main display, creating an almost tablet sized canvas. You can stretch the home screen and apps across the two displays for a larger working area, or you can run two different apps at the same time, one on each screen. You can also "tent" the phone, and mirror the displays so two people can see the same content at the same time. ZTE says that it is utilizing Android's default split-screen features to enable many of the dual-screen functions, and it has made sure the "top 100" Android apps work on the phone. In the "extended" mode, which stretches a single app across both screens, the tablet version of the app is presented (provided there is one, which isn't always a guarantee with Android apps). It's even possible to stream video on both screens at the same time and switch the audio between them on the fly, which might be useful if you want to watch a sports game and YouTube at the same time, I guess.
I wonder... (Score:3)
Can it be rooted? Can the baked-in spyware be shut down?
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I was looking into rooting several kinds of ZTE phones, and my findings were not good.
What I found was some of the existing tools could give you temporary root, but after a reboot the locked down bootloader would undo it.
I don't think this new Axon M will be any easier.
Goddamnit! (Score:1)
I just want a hard keyboard!
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What , the Android and iOS keyboards aren’t hard enough?
Can't touch type on a touch screen (Score:2)
What , the Android and iOS keyboards aren’t hard enough?
It's not that they're hard as much as that they're flat.
"Touch typing", or typing while focusing on the document instead of the input device, requires feeling the edges of the keys in order to line up the fingers over each desired key, as opposed to adjacent keys or adjacent space without keys (a "whiff"). The flat sheet of glass in front of an on-screen keyboard fails to give this sort of tactile positioning feedback.
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Blackberry KEYone
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BB KeyOne, while a complete piece of crap, is an option. Anecdotally I couldn't get a single person on my support team to even try it out when I offered the demo unit we bought to them...it's that bad by reputation alone.
Other than that, consider the detachable keyboards for Samsung. They flip on the back side of the case so you can use the full screen and otherwise provide a full, tactile keyboard very similar to the old BB Bold (which wasn't my favorite tactile KB...that being the Curve) and quite good.
Innovative (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure I'd want one, but at least they're making a decent effort to be innovative. For the last 10 years all phone companies have been doing is trying to make a "better iPhone" (as in the 2007 original).
Re:Innovative (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure I'd want one, but at least they're making a decent effort to be innovative
I don't know about you, but I'd find a 6000 mAH battery more useful than a second small screen on my phone.
There are a few crappy phones out there with huge batteries, but most won't run on US frequencies.
I'll just keep waiting for that innovation I guess.
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Then buy a phone with a battery case or just carry around an external battery to charge your phone.
This, "I NEED someone to build a monstrous internal battery phone" that very few people will actually buy comes from people with rigid mentalities that refuse to adapt.
Well when I was a youngster, we had phones with internal batteries that we could change. I could plug those internal batteries into a proprietary charger and thus by turning off my phone and swapping batteries I could have a fully charged phone in 30 seconds.
Using proprietary battery chargers is dumb & those batteries are useless if you need to charge anything else. If you ABSOLUTELY need to have an all in one, use a battery case but I've never found that plugging in an external battery (to devi
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Huge numbers of people? You and a few geeks repeating yourselves in an echo chamber != huge. If there was more than a laughably small market for huge battery phones, they would exist and sell in non negligible numbers.
As huge battery phones _don't_ sell, one can only s_n_i_g_g_e_r (underscored because of slashdot's lameness filter) at the twits with their heads up their posteriors who think that _they_ know what is missing on the market.
Slashdot, fix your lameness filter. That word is perfectly innocuous.
Re:Innovative (Score:4, Insightful)
For the last 10 years all phone companies have been doing is trying to make a "better iPhone" (as in the 2007 original).
I'm actually pretty disappointed in what passes for improvements on current-gen Android smartphones: Curved glass (because fuck perfect display geometry, I guess), rounded display edges (CRT nostalgia?), no headphone jack, on-screen navigation buttons (because some designer decided physical buttons are ugly), and all screen sizes below 5.2" are reserved for bargain-bin prepaid crap phones.
My top-loader washing machine doesn't look much different from the ones sold back in the 70s. I probably wouldn't have bought it if it had all sorts of superfluous features and embellishments, from 4 decades of "innovation". My current laptop [lenovo.com] doesn't look significantly different from the nearly 11-year-old laptop [wikimedia.org] it replaced. Perhaps one day the smartphone industry will stop trying to shoot for the moon with "innovative" new designs, and just stick to improving performance, camera quality, and battery life.
Re: Innovative (Score:2)
I prefer the on screen buttons actually. You get more screen real estate because the buttons disappear when you don't need then. I had to disable the physical buttons on my Samsung tablet cause I kept hitting back in portrait mode while reading comic books (that required some heavy modding too; something so basic shouldn't be so difficult!)
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That's only true if there's no bottom bezel, which is usually not the case. Otherwise you just end up with the on-screen buttons taking up precious screen real estate, and then a blank strip of glass or plastic where physical or at least capacitive buttons could've been located.
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Why would a front loaded machine use less water? ... ... hence rests of soap are in the cloth.
And water usage hardly is an issue in the civilized world, as it costs next to nothing. Oh, I forgot about California
Plenty if my friends are complaining that the washing stepp where only clear water is used to remove the soap uses not enough water
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Current laptops don't look much like those from 5-years ago, let alone 10. My laptop from even 5-years ago had a huge bezel and was very thick compared to what I have today, plus all the keyboard layout changes, large trackpads, etc.
Curved screen corners annoyed me momentarily, then I realized that real estate was pretty irrelevant. If its needed for yields or manufacturing it seems fine /shrug
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trying to make a "better iPhone" (as in the 2007 original).
The one that couldn't do almost anything? That's not a terribly high bar, surely.
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Will the screens 'slam' together when you close it, or do so gently?
What if you have this phone in your pocket and something else in your pocket comes between the two screens (eg. a pen) - a little pressure to sandwich the foreign object and one/both of the screens could crack.
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RTFA much? Just go look at the picture. You'll have completely different questions afterwards.
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I have no problem with ZTE trying to innovate - though this particular brick doesn't appeal much to me. My problem, though, is that ZTE doesn't seem to have the resources to adequately support the phones that they actually sell, and this is where they're focusing their attention?
I have an Axon 7, which admittedly, is pretty up to date software wise (and has had many of its problems addressed). I bought it because, at the time, ZTE was making noises about unlocking the bootloader and working hand-in-hand w
Here we go again (Score:1)
Ethics (Score:1)
Great! More Slashvertisement!
This is the **same** ZTE that had deals with Iran and North Korea.
Chinese tech firm ZTE has agreed to pay a $1.2 billion penalty for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/0... [cnn.com]
Brick (Score:2)
The article goes on and on about the two screens. Wow. And a big battery (of course). Yes!
But guess what is hidden at the end of the article?
Yep. Weight and size: 12mm thick and 230 grams. It's a total brick. So much of innovation.
This is very cool (Score:2)
and i like it very much, depending on the price it might be my next phone. this is true innovation, if you ask me. What i also like is that the phone is not a fragile small device, because it has two screens it is a thicker.
the only downside i see right now is that the camera is hidden behind the second screen, so if you want to take a picture, you need to 'unfold' it.
An answer to a question nobody asked (Score:4, Insightful)
What was the point again?
Meh (Score:1)
e ink? (Score:2)
I want a second screen to be touchscreen e ink so I can see it outdoors...
I could find something like this useful (Score:2)
INNOVATIVE idea, DOA with at&t (Score:2)