The Nubia Alpha Wearable Smartphone blurs the line between phones and watches. The device’s flexible 4-inch OLED screen with a 36 : 9 aspect ratio sits inside a metal band, with a 5MP front-facing camera in the middle. It can be wrapped around the wrist for use as a smartwatch and when unwrapped, adopts a flat shape for use as a smartphone with a tall aspect ratio display. It features a Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor, 1GB RAM, 8GB of onboard storage and 500mAh battery plus a heart rate monitor, sleep tracker and pedometer. Its gesture control allows users to scroll or swipe by waving a finger over the device. Nubia Alpha comes with Bluetooth and a version with eSIM support. It runs a custom version of Android (Alpha OS) that supports everything from photos and phone calls to texts and movie watching.
One of the more interesting features of the smartwatch is gesture control, which allows you to wave your finger over the device to get it to scroll up and down, or left and right. We had to physically go into a settings menu to activate the functionality — which was clearly labeled as being an “alpha” feature — on our demo unit. To be fair to the device, we were in a dark room filled with occasional bright spotlights, but the functionality was buggy, and clearly wasn’t ready for public use.
So what can the wearable smartphone do? Lots of things, as it turns out. There’s all the standard smartwatch functionality such as fitness tracking, mobile payments (though only the Chinese QR code payment service AliPay was mentioned), and voice calls either through its built-in speaker or a connected Bluetooth headset.
Credit : The Verge
Picture Credit : Google
