The Verge Goes Hands-On With the 'Wildly Ambitious' RED Hydrogen One Smartphone (theverge.com)

It's been almost a year since RED, a company known for its high-end $10,000+ cameras, teased a smartphone called the RED Hydrogen One. Several months have passed since the phone was announced and we still don't know much about it, aside from it having a very industrial design and "Hydrogen holographic display." Earlier this week, AT&T and Verizon confirmed that they'll launch the device later this year. Now, The Verge's Dieter Bohn has shared his hands-on impressions with the device, which he claims to be "one of the most ambitious smartphones in years from a company not named Apple, Google, or Samsung." Here's an excerpt from the report: The company better known for high-end 4K cameras with names like "Weapon" and "Epic-w" isn't entering the smartphone game simply to sell you a better Android phone. No, this phone is meant to be one piece of a modular system of cameras and other media creation equipment -- the company claims it will be "the foundation of a future multi-dimensional media system." To that end, it has a big set of pogo-pins on the back to connect it to RED's other cameras also to allow users to attach (forthcoming) modules to it, including lens mounts. If it were just a modular smartphone, we'd be talking about whether we really expected the company to produce enough modules to support it.

RED is planning on starting with a module that is essentially a huge camera sensor -- the company is not ready to give exact details, but the plan is definitely more towards DSLR size than smartphone size. Then, according to CEO Jim Jannard, the company wants any traditional big camera lens to be attached to it. Answering a fan question, he joked that support for lenses will be "pretty limited," working "just" with Fuji, Canon, Nikon, Leica, and more. [...] The processor inside will be a slightly-out-of-date Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, but it seemed fast enough in the few demos I was able to try. Honestly, though, if you're looking to get this thing just as a phone, you're probably making your decision based on the wrong metrics. It's probably going to be a perfectly capable phone, but at this price (starting at $1,195) what you're buying into is the module ecosystem.

Comments

Hasn't been this much excitement about Hydrogen

[JoeyRox]

since the Hindenburg....

Re:Does hit have a screen?

[Ecuador]

They signed an NDA and are not allowed to show the screen. This has not stopped some people from showing it though. The idea is that the screen itself is not impressive, "just" a 5.7" display in a huge body, at a time when expensive phones tend to go very thin-bezel, so photos of the front make this expensive device look like a "blast from the past". The basic gimmick, err, feature of the phone's screen, which is the pseudo-3D effect cannot show in images, so they believe they need to build a whole narrative before showing the screen to people, to a void "$1200 for this crap?".
Because, indeed, you will not buy this phone for the display, or the cpu, or even the "holographic" effect gimmick, it isn't supposed to be worth its price as a just a phone, so only when we get a look at what this connectivity/modules/ecosystem comprises of exactly, will we know if it is an interesting device. Judging from how they are doing with their cameras, they might have a few tricks up their sleeve.
That said, they still could put a bit larger display compared to the size of that phone, especially now when everyone and their mother has a bezel-less phone.