There are a lot of weird phones out there, but I’ve never seen one quite like this before. Oppo’s new concept phone, the Oppo X 2021, might at first appear to be a standard 2020 phone with a 6.7″ display. One quick swipe on the side, however, and the screen expands to a more tablet-like 7.4″ size. Magic? Almost — it’s thanks to a flexible screen and a motorized scroll mechanism.
Oppo calls it a “continuously variable OLED display” because it can be unrolled to any size between 6.7″ and 7.4″. In a demo shown off by the company, the device’s UI was able to adjust itself depending on the current size of the screen, even resizing video as the display expanded and contracted.
While we don’t know any specific details on the specs of the screen or its durability, Oppo did go into detail about how it works. Essentially, the Oppo X 2021 is a fancy scroll with a motorized mechanism that controls the screen movements.
Oppo stresses that this is still in the concept stage despite the working prototype, and that it hopes to roll the new technology out to consumers sometime in the future. The company experimented with an under-display camera last year, but that still hasn’t really panned out. This expandable screen tech is definitely cool, but there are still a lot of obstacles to work through before it’s ready for a mainstream release.
