…unique. That’s the first word that would come to mind (and to that of my friend who drove so I could write this post) – After that, the decription gets a bit more complicated.
I got an invite (along with several hundred other folks, wow it was packed!) to go and see the “sneak peak” of the RED Hydrogen One mobile phone. After arriving at the RED Studios up in Hollywood, and gaining entry to Stage 5 – I went right away to the booth where the phone was going to demo’ed. And I got it in my hands and got a chance to experience RED’s vision for a smartphone first hand. And…I don’t know what to think. On the one hand, there isn’t any way I can describe what the sensation of seeing the H4V display is like. And even if I had been allowed to video the display (which I wasn’t, no one was) it woudn’t have come across so that effort would have been fruitless. It’s interesting and new in a way that is exciting to tech enthusiasts, like yours truly.
On the other hand…its a niche product with a limited (for now) use case. Much like 4k when it was first introduced, there isn’t enough of an avenue for H4V and A3D content (the H4V is the holo display content and A3D is the 3D audio, which was very interesting in the demo) to get into people’s hands to really justify what will certainly be a very high price tag. So – what RED is asking for is to people (many of whom will have never even heard of the name RED) buy on faith a phone that costs at least $1,200. And likely much higher after AT&T and Verizon (both of whom have signed on to carry the phone, which is perhaps the most imressive RED achievement of the day) And keep in mind that by the time this phone is available, the processor and GPU will be very much last years tech and many more affordable flagships with better specs and smaller form factors (this is a BIG phone) will have been launched.
The story of the RED Hydrogen phone is….still yet to be told. More to come, but make sure you head over to our YouTube Channel to get some more of my first impressions, and some video from the actual event. Cheers!
Silicon Theory 