The Thinnest Smartphone in the World.
just look at it that is that's ridiculous so as i've been making other videos over the last few months i've also been gathering seven of the rarest strangest smartphones you've ever seen so number seven is the galaxy s4 zoom i got a bit lucky with this one i logged on to ebay and it was sitting in front of me but this is a special phone because while it might seem like just a standard 2013 device from the front turn it over and you realize we've got a bit of an imposter on our hands but do you wanna know the crazy part all of this stuff is just there so that this phone can have 10 times optical zoom the modern day galaxy s21 ultra also has 10 times optical zoom it's just this one doesn't look like it's been let loose in an all-you-can-eat buffet samsung wasn't wrong about zoom being a key selling point in the future it's just that soon after this phone came out companies figured out a more efficient way of doing it see the traditional method and how it was done on the s4 zoom as well as just generally point and shoot cameras is to have a whole load of stacked bits of glass that by changing the distance between them can magnify things without losing quality but then came the eureka moment of multiple cameras what if instead of just one camera that you have to put all of this movable glass in front of so it can reach all of these different magnifications we just have two fixed cameras one that can capture a wide view and one that can capture that zoomed view this worked so well that in 2021 every single smartphone uses this technology and if we test these two phones side by side i mean obviously we are comparing 2013 to 2021 here but it's just cool that we're now at a stage where in most aspects this clever engineering paired with a bit of software magic can outperform last gen's pure optics number six is the no phone number six is the no phone and it kind of looks like the pinnacle of stupidity but it worked and thanks to huel for sponsoring this video ouch so this is the packaging and it's probably its best feature no literally you can do more things with the bag it came in than the thing itself and is it just me or does this no phone look suspiciously like another not so innovative device but what this company did is played on the growing sentiment that tech is ruining our lives they said to people do you feel the constant urge to have your phone with you to which most people probably said yes do you wish you could be less attached to it to which most people probably also said yes the solution is simple hold our thing instead people bought their vision this idea that the no phone was effectively the anti smartphone how its branded is taking zero megapixel photos and having zero gigabytes of storage and how it's toilet bowl resistant because it's a sheet of plastic it was fully funded on kickstarter the creators were invited to all manner of interviews and even a ted talk and they're still selling them today six years later although when i tried to get one there was a serious stock shortage and it took them like an extra month to get it to me but that's even crazier they're selling bundles the couple's cure the family plan even the employee gift pack and they released a follow-up device i really wish i was joking but this is an actual product and i'm just out here trying to think what would the returns process look like on this hey uh my no phone air doesn't seem to be working ah let me have a look [Music] seems good to me um okay i don't really like this phone can i can i just get my money back why of course just please return the device first i just it's right here with all due respect sir that is your hand [Music] number four imagine this headline ex-apple ceo starts his own phone company and not just any apple ceo this was john scully the guy who who kind of replaced steve jobs back in the day and his idea was interesting that most 200 budget devices at the time were purely functional they had little to no attention given to hardware design or even software design so scully created the company ob with the goal of producing phones that had that apple brag factor that designed in silicon valley coolness but for emerging markets like india and africa and just given the fact that apple has got such a reputation for only doing things when they know they're going to be huge the sky was the limit here and i'd even go as far as to say that the presentation was promising it was a great demonstration of how the company could make something both premium and practically priced it's just for a fashion focus device it sure does look an awful lot like a toilet seat the bottom is rounded the top is flat it generally looks like the company built a rounded phone first and then realized wait a second this just looks like every other phone make it different and i think this kind of mentality is also what led them to a screen that is raised above the rest of the phone i think the idea was to prevent your fingers resting on the display itself but yes this is as impractical as it looks more fundamentally though if you're entering a new market with a new product and a new brand then the one thing that you've got to absolutely make sure you're doing is solving a problem that people are having because yes you could argue they have built a cooler phone for people who like toilets but for the majority of the markets they were targeting being visually unique was far from the primary concern so it flopped they went back to the drawing board relaunched and it flopped again and it wasn't long before john scully just straight up started denying his involvement with the company pretty fun story but now is where things start to get really curious this is the k1 impulse marketed as the most secure device on the planet and i got to start by saying this is easily top 5 smartphone unboxing experiences that i've probably ever had so if we take off the wrapper and the sleeve we're left with two magnetic doors and inside them is everything you could possibly expect but also everything that you probably didn't we've got the phone which says privacy is the new order feels like i'm joining a cult we've got a beefy insert with a whole menu of paperwork as well as a very unusually shaped case and of course you can take this layer off and as well as just a charger and a usbc cable you get a full three-course meal of travel adapters but then we go back to the top layer again and you find a carbon fiber wireless charging pad a pair of really quite high-end wireless earphones with a display on top that shows battery percentage and then take off this middle part and you've got three private keys which will make sense in a minute and then uh what what is this if anyone has any idea just let me know and if you thought it couldn't get any stranger well i mean just look at it long story short this may come as a surprise after that ridiculously embellished unboxing experience but this phone was a scam the company had built their own supposedly ultra secure crypto data os these keys you're actually meant to plug them into the phone so you can enter your own secure vault and it's the weirdest thing they tried to legitimize their own security by inviting people to hack them first thing you see on this website is hackers for a million dollars could you ever imagine like any legitimate company doing this and their number one selling point was that this was the first and only phone to run voice over blockchain protocol or vob i mean if we're all inventing words here then a sub to the channel would be pleb you've probably heard a fair bit about the blockchain it's the basis of bitcoin but at its core it's just a decentralized way of storing data so that it doesn't belong to any one single person or company but the issue with blockchain is that it's just not very well understood by most so this company basically tried to use that ambiguity to make it seem like it had almost magical properties they said to people things like you get unlimited storage for free because blockchain anyways just before this phone came out the guys behind it were suspected of a scam involving cryptocurrency and it was bad timing because all of a sudden people were like wait a second is anything they said actually true and sure enough under scrutiny it turns out that the private keys were just flash drives almost every article covering the launch was a paid article by the company and in the name of supposed security most basic smartphone features like gmail social media and even importing contacts did not work and for everyone who messaged their helpline to try and get some support on this they either got completely blanked or they got given a 200 word essay on how these were the necessary precautions needed for vobop to work also i'm getting the sinking feeling that what they've actually done here is just bought a cheap phone from china and then stuck this fancy casing around it and made it their own because otherwise why does this look suspiciously like a 3d printed cutout and why else would it have not one but two sets of bezels it's very suspicious and customers soon started to worry that by buying this phone and by having used it to manage their own cryptocurrency wallets they'd inadvertently given the company behind this phone full access to their crypto accounts and so they were worried that this company could effectively steal their money which they were suspected of in this other scam and then remotely brick their device with a software update pretty scary stuff okay number two is rare so rare that i couldn't find a single unopened one of these on the entire internet and the only one that i could find literally came delivered to me in a lunchbox the ultimate and reusable packaging i guess it's just it's just a shame that there are no sandwiches included welcome to the turing phone and i've got to say apart from the fact that this kind of feels like holding a pair of scissors on the wrong end i think it looks gorgeous it's an almost modular aesthetic with each panel having a slightly different soft touch matte finish with one of them just straight up dragon scale texture it's weird that it works but i think it does work and the whole thing is apparently built from liquid morphium which is stronger than steel but what is it well picture this it's 2015 we've had the galaxy s6 the iphone 6s but touring robotic industries just comes out of nowhere and says hold up we've got a phone that not just outspects them but is encrypted to keep your privacy i wonder where we've heard that one before these phones did get made or at least like a few of them did but most sources say that not a single one got delivered to customers somewhere along the line i think it really hit this company just how hard it is to make a fully working smartphone and how they really needed more than the 50 employees they had to do it you know of all markets i'd be willing to bet that the smartphone market is probably one of the hardest for new companies to enter it feels like everyone wants a stab at it but at the same time eighty percent of the market is controlled by literally six companies anyways where this gets interesting is that after the turing phone didn't work out during robotic industries kind of started to fall into a bit of a downward spiral they'd lost some of their reputation so what do they do they try to tease an even more extreme phone to stay on people's minds the turing phone cadenza with get this an imax 6k quad camera a super capacitor battery paired with a hydrogen fuel cell and dual snapdragon 830 chips which are products that never actually existed and so when that too inevitably ended up with nothing they went even crazier they changed their name to touring space industries and teased something called the hubble phone with you know it's not even worth going through the spec sheet it didn't happen and so the supposed encryption and the liquid morpheme that we're getting here well i'm having my doubts but no one's tested it because no one got the phone if you look at this company's bio they describe themselves as a mobile technology company which develops technologies based on decentralized authentication methodology using static key exchange with an anonymous key distribution infrastructure point is the one thing to take away from this video is that if a company can't tell you what they're doing for you in simple terms then there's a pretty good chance that they're trying to hide something also fun fact i found a reddit thread from someone who applied to work for these guys and as part of his interview he was tasked with doing what seems an awful lot like their job for them they basically gave him like a two week long assignment which involved building an app from scratch with a really specific set of functions clever but very sneaky okay finally the thinnest smartphone in the world i knew i wanted to see one of these in person i just i had no idea how to get one i literally i set up ebay alerts in case anyone listed one i've trawled through sites like aliexpress and gearbest probably once every two weeks in case any seller found they still had inventory nothing and so just before i was about to pretty much ditch the entire video idea i thought let me just message vivo just in case no expectations and so i did and they even warned me like this is probably not gonna happen the phone is long discontinued but one month later i was just doing something completely different and i got an out the blue email saying we found it and here we are so this is the vivo x5 max it's a pretty understated package for a phone with this prestigious a title you get the device on top and then earphones charger and manuals let's do this [Music] clearly the outer plastic wasn't built to wait seven years okay let me give you some perspective the rog phone five is 10.3 millimeters thick the oneplus 9 is 8.7 millimeters thick the iphone 12 mini this tiny thing is 7.4 millimeters thick this is 4.75 the phone feels almost two-dimensional compared to what i'm used to i'm pretty sure i've had rulers that are thicker than this but do you wanna know the funny part they've still managed to get a headphone jack on there you can actually see that the metal trim of the phone is so narrow that they've had to cut into the back plate just so it fits which goes to show that if a company wants to put a headphone jack on a phone they can put a headphone jack on the phone and the crazy part of this is that this is 2015. could you imagine if we wanted to build the thinnest phone in the world now in 2021 with all our performance and efficiency improvements we could probably make a better phone that's 3.75 millimeters but it's just that priorities have changed in 2021 people want advanced camera systems and 5g and big batteries and all of these things lead to bulkier phones plus i just i feel like being this thin is a little counterintuitive because it's so thin that it's more likely to break but if you then put a case on it it's not thin it's still a beautiful bit of tech to look at and still an engineering marvel but i reckon if a company released a really thin phone today then tons of people would flock to go and see it but very few of them would actually follow through and buy it okay this is huell i've actually been drinking this stuff for like four years before the company actually reached out and wanted to sponsor something but here we are so when you buy huel you're basically buying a whole meal in powder form you get a free shaker with it and to make it you literally just add water and shake and it's actually built so that you don't even need to pour it into anything you drink it from the shaker it's healthy like almost the entire ingredients list is just oats peas coconuts grains it's got tons of protein 26 essential vitamins and minerals and it tastes surprisingly good and the one i've switched to recently is the new black edition which is the exact same concept but with 33 more protein and 50 less carbs so give it a try i have left a link down below and if you order through there you get not just the fuel and the shaker but also a heel t-shirt they are very nice t-shirts anyways thank you so much for watching my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one you