China’s leading the next big phone trend with sliding cameras

Apple and seemingly every Android phone maker under the sun want us to embrace the smartphone notch, but things don’t have to be this way.

There is a realistic path toward a phone with a true all-screen display without any ugly cutouts: cameras that slide up when you need them and retract when you don’t.

If there’s any one thing that science fiction films have taught me, it’s that pocket communicators (or phones as we call them) have only one final form: They’re just a screen. They should have no bezels at all.

But as much as mobile technology has improved, phones have yet to evolve into a single sheet of glass … until now.

We’re witnessing the dawn of a new era of smartphone designs that bring us closer to sci-fi’s prophesied all-screen communicator.

This time, however, it’s not Apple or Samsung leading the innovation charge — it’s Chinese brands.

Chinese smartphone maker Oppo garnered a lot attention recently with its Find X phone. The phone has an impressive 91 percent screen-to-body ratio thanks to a motorized mechanism that raises and lowers the front and rear cameras whenever they’re needed.

Vivo’s Nex S has also been a source of much excitement. It has a camera that pops up and retracts, but the motorized module is only for the selfie camera, not the rear.

Two brands making phones with sliding camera modules is experimentation and can hardly be considered a trend.

But at IFA 2018, Huawei joined the club with a tease for the Honor Magic 2. Like the Oppo Find X, the phone has a camera that slides up from the body to reveal the selfie camera. The difference between the Find X and the Magic 2 is that the latter’s sliding camera is manual and not motorized.

And not to be outdone, Xiaomi, which didn’t have an official presence at IFA, jumped the gun and teased the Mi Mix 3. And what does the photo shared by Xiaomi president Lin Bin reveal? Oh, look, also a sliding camera!

Xiaomi’s implementation appears to be different. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see the entire screen slides down and the backside with the selfie camera slides up. It’s not clear if the sliding feature is manual or motorized.

With Huawei and Xiaomi now onboard, the modern slider phone won’t be an experiment for long. It’s already morphing into a full-blown mobile trend that could influence other smartphone makers to follow suit.

Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Huawei may not be well-known brands with huge marketshare in the U.S. or Europe, but they’ve still got a great amount of growing reach serving China’s 1.47 billion population.

Phones with sliding camera mechanisms are still in their infancy and it’s difficult to predict if they’ll catch on. There’s legitimate concern that motorized camera modules have higher chances of breaking or failing. 

The Oppo Find X is only rated for 300,000 movements up and down and the Nex S for an even lower 50,000 actuations. That means these parts have a limited lifespan and once they’ve exceeded the actuation ratings, they’ll stop working. And if you somehow accidentally break the camera module, well, you’re stuck with a busted phone.

A manual mechanism to slide the camera up and down seems like a safer bet, but there’s still the risk of the internal mechanism degrading with daily use over time.

Of course, the bright side to these slider phone designs is that the front will be virtually all display with really high screen-to-body ratios. I can already imagine an updated version of a phone like the Sharp Aquos Crystal, which has no bezels on three of its four sides, with zero bezels at all.

Until the selfie cameras, earpiece, and proximity and light sensors can be completely embedded underneath the screen, sliding camera modules (mechanical or manual) appear to be the best way to fulfill the all-screen phone dream. And lucky for us, China’s phone makers are making them a reality.