7 minutes 40 seconds
🇬🇧 English
Arun
00:00
So a couple of weeks ago,
Arun
00:01
I tried to shift over from my iPhone to a flip phone I loved some parts of it others made me cry till I eventually decided this is not for me There needs to be more competition and more innovation in this market before I flip then techno reached out They said we've got this new flip phone. We want to sponsor a video so you can tell people about it. I told them, listen, I've just tested a flip phone.
Arun
00:20
I'm not ready to move to 1. That includes yours.
Arun
00:23
And they said, that's fine. Just try it. So I did.
Arun
00:26
And while
Arun
00:27
I still won't be switching to it, I am really glad this Phantom V Flip exists. And here are the 10 reasons why. For starters, the unboxing.
Arun
00:34
You get your nice premium packaging, with every inner box having this faux leather finish. Your SIM ejector, your USB-C cable, a 45-volt power brick, a pretty nice feeling case that protects both sides of the phone, and obviously, the phone. And I'm really glad that this is still a thing.
Arun
00:48
Because yeah, if you
Arun
00:49
upgraded phones every year and very little changed, then of course, like most big companies say, you could just use the power brick and cable that you already had for the environment. But the thing is, most people don't upgrade every year. The vast majority of people now are sitting in the once every 3-4 years bucket, especially in the category of expensive forwarding phones.
Arun
01:08
Not to mention
Arun
01:08
the fact that the power brick and cable you already have, are you not probably going to want
Arun
01:12
to send those off with the old phone, since that's what they were made for? Plus, you'd still need a case.
Arun
01:17
90% of people use 1.
Arun
01:19
And so there's no real reason for a company to not give you 1 except for, please spend another $50 on our website and we'll create an entirely different order and shipment that's in no way environmentally friendly.
Arun
01:29
Okay, Then we've got the price. Foldable phones right now feel like they're in
Arun
01:34
a bubble, where just because the early starting prices were so high that it set the precedent that this is what a foldable phone
Arun
01:40
should cost. But with the first phones, it made sense, because
Arun
01:43
to do something experimental, you have to invest a lot in research and development to sell not many units.
Arun
01:48
But you know, we're at our third to fifth generation
Arun
01:51
of foldables with most companies. These companies have already recouped those R&D costs. Credit where due, the flips have come down a bit since gen
Arun
01:57
1,
Arun
01:57
with their default starting price at now $1000. But like
Arun
02:00
$1800 for 1 of the folds?
Arun
02:02
That should not be a thing today. And so part of why I'm so glad that this thing exists is that it's a working example of that. This has a 1-120Hz OLED display.
Arun
02:11
It has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a pretty good Dimensity 8050 chip, and it's $699. And when something like this happens in an industry, it's good for all of us. Here's something else really cool. So you know how like every phone since the year 2000 has had a flash on the back?
Arun
02:26
This 1 actually has a really bright quad flash.
Arun
02:28
But the more interesting thing is that it also
Arun
02:29
has a dual flash on the front.
Arun
02:31
And when I first saw this, I thought, wait, that's pointless.
Arun
02:35
I mean, most phones nowadays can already brighten their screens up when taking
Arun
02:38
a dark selfie and that's the same thing, right? Well, no. If you compare this
Arun
02:43
shot taken with no flash to this shot with the screen brightening feature to this shot with the front flash, you can see that while brightness goes up with the bright screen mode, the sharpness doesn't. And the colour accuracy actually goes down. It almost starts to look a little hazy.
Arun
02:56
And so I have actually found this front flash to be legitimately the best way to take selfies. Even in already good lighting, it just lets your camera capture that little bit of extra facial detail. I think Tecno's gestures are really clever. Like how I've got a pinch out to open chat GPT, a swipe up with 2 fingers to bring up the vault, which is all your stuff that you can lock behind your fingerprint.
Arun
03:14
You can even do things like a clockwise
Arun
03:16
rotation to instantly start a voice search. Okay, this is also really smart design. I've always liked leather-like finishes.
Arun
03:24
I want every single company to offer this as an option because it's just 0 fingerprint hassle-free.
Arun
03:30
The hinge has a little bit more friction than I'm used to, but
Arun
03:32
the upside of that is that it holds in any position from about 20 degrees onwards.
Arun
03:36
I'm glad that when it folds, it folds completely flat, but more importantly, the fact that
Arun
03:40
it can do that while also finding room for the screen to rest without being pressed together, which means that when it's open, it doesn't really have a noticeable crease. You can see it from some angles, but it's good enough that during most day-to-day use, it's literally as if it's not there, which now that I've experienced it, is
Arun
03:56
almost confusing. How did Tecno on their first ever flip phone priced at $699 do that? While others who've been
Arun
04:03
doing this for years with more expensive phones have not.
Arun
04:06
Either way, I do hope this acts as
Arun
04:08
an incentive for other manufacturers to get it right going forward. And then you've got this cover screen, which they call the Planet Design. Now I gotta say, I'm not used to using circular screens, but 1 thing this does do at least is feel like a very distinct experience to the inner display.
Arun
04:22
It kind of behaves like a smartwatch with a bunch of these easy to flick through, functional but not too functional widgets. You've got things like fitness, you've got alarms and a stopwatch and it's all very pleasantly animated. Plus the music tile is pretty cool because it really does look like you're playing a vinyl. And that leads me to the customization.
Arun
04:38
The customization settings here are absolutely endless and I'm all about it. Okay. Deep breath. So for starters, themes.
Arun
04:46
There's built-in ones and you can download like a thousand more. You've got different live wallpapers that sync to how far open or closed your phone is, static wallpapers with the ability to quickly find more and what I've done which is to cycle through them every single time I unlock my phone. There's cover screen personalisation, where you can either lean in to the fact that, let's be honest, it really does look like a watch face.
Arun
05:01
You can go very abstract and artsy
Arun
05:03
and stick a whale on there, or you
Arun
05:04
can just go all the way and get a pet or
Arun
05:06
a stylized version of yourself, which I don't hate nearly as much as I thought I would. There's the always on display stuff, which again, lets you do basically anything you can think of, including deciding how much or little information you want to see. And that's not even touching the deep, deep personalisation, which I could go on about for an entirely separate video.
Arun
05:21
But what's also really cool is the special functions section of the settings. It's an entire subclimate of things that
Arun
05:26
you couldn't normally fiddle with on your phone.
Arun
05:28
All the way from App Booster, which lets you select a few of your favourite apps and the phone will keep them ready for launch at all times, to music gesture, which lets you change the song that's playing by swiping on your screen even when the phone's on standby, to WhatsApp voice changer, which turns this voice
Arun
05:40
to this voice on a WhatsApp video call to terrorise your entire social circle,
Arun
05:45
or if you're feeling particularly fruity, you can go to this voice. And if you're enjoying this video, then a sub to the channel would be fantastic.
Arun
05:54
Now I've always thought
Arun
05:55
that flip phones are cool. There are honestly few higher pleasures in life than ending a phone call like this. But what I find really difficult is feeling like I'm sacrificing functionality for the sake of being cool.
Arun
06:05
And that's what a lot of folding phones have done historically with battery. There's still some compromise here. It's a 4000 milliamp hour cell you're getting, but that paired with fast 45 watt charging actually feels pretty healthy compared to the 3,700 mAh and 25W combo that I've just come from with the Samsung. Also, remember, flip phones will last a lot longer than you expect, just because you're spending a large portion of your time on a tiny cover screen.
Arun
06:27
And speaking of which, number 2, the cameras. This is the highest resolution overall package of cameras that you can get on a flip phone and obviously we're well past the point where That's the only important metric But the only reason I mention it is that I have multiple times now taken a photo with this phone forgotten about it seen it Again another time while flicking through the gallery and only then realized wait a sec. The detail can be Insane It has the same caveat as every flip phone in that it's effort every time you want to take a rear photo, but the selfies, which are the default, are really good in almost all lighting conditions with a nice balance of smoothing the skin, but not erasing every last bit of texture. And importantly for a flip phone like this, it's good that you can activate the camera with gestures like a high 5 or voice commands.
Arun
07:09
But the thing that I found most interesting is the weird security features. Just lots of little tricks that no 1 would think to build into their phone, but now they're here, they make a lot
Arun
07:19
of sense. Like just for
Arun
07:19
example, how after 2 failed unlock attempts, your phone will start secretly taking photos of whoever's trying, and upload those photos to the cloud, which has resulted in an entire library of shots that look like this. Or if you stick the phone on charge and someone else unplugs it while it's still locked, it'll ring at full volume. These are great features to have built into a phone, and I'd love to see others adopting them too.
Omnivision Solutions Ltd