Xiaomi may be best known for its competent and extremely affordable smartphones, but it also loves to be flexible with its truly ambitious designs. (Case in point: this folding prototype or this phone that has almost 100 percent screen.) The company’s latest is among the most attractive and, as usual, all because of its screen – in this case, a “cascade checkered display ”that extends over the four sides of the phone.
As the company notes in a blog post describing the concept, getting a screen that can solve the problem is very simple, now that flexible display panels have become more common. The real challenge, notes Xiaomi, was “to make a 88 ° grid glass panel” and stick it to the underlying screen. In all, says Xiaomi, the process of correctly molding glass layers like this involved internal processing equipment, 800 degree heat, various polishing tools and thousands of attempts.
With all that said, there were limits to what Xiaomi was able to accomplish here. If, for example, you are wondering how Xiaomi engineers managed to stretch and fold that glass in the corners of the phone, the answer is simple: they did not. The dark and moody videos and renderings of the company’s products do a great job of hiding them, but there are small clippings in every corner. So much for the “just one screen” look that the company was looking for.
In addition to all the intelligence of the screen on display, the latter concept is also notable for its total lack of physical controls and ports. Instead, the company relied on 46 of its patents and integrated smart alternatives, such as pressure-sensitive touch sensors in place of buttons and “industry-leading acoustic flexible film display technology” in place of a speaker and traditional grid. The lack of a USB-C port also means wireless charging, and who knows – perhaps it is to work with another of Xiaomi’s recent announcements, a remote wireless charging system that the company calls “Mi Air Charge”.
Okay, not all of these developments are particularly new, but the fact that Xiaomi is exploring how all of these disparate developments can be used together is one of the clearest signs that it plans to launch a fully monoblock smartphone in the future. They are also not the only ones. Rumors have long suggested that Apple would like to completely abandon the doors of its iPhone lineup. If Xiaomi and Apple launched devices without a door, the pressure would be on the rest of the industry to be completely unibody, and it’s hard to imagine that the status quo would remain the status quo for long.