What happened to the motorized cameras hidden in the cell phone in search of the infinite screen

The design of any product is heavily influenced by industry trends and obsessions and if we talk about cell phones, there is one that has been in the spotlight for years: an all-screen front. OLED panels have reduced the edges, but the front camera remains a current obstacle. There are those who solved it with a hole, others with a notch that ended up evolving into a dynamic island and there are those who played it with something different: integrate the selfie camera into a motorized room.

A priori, adding a part with a movement does not seem very good in terms of user-friendliness and resistance to the passage of time, but if the mechanism is robust enough not to shorten the standard lifespan and has its reason for being, why not. Let them tell the folders, who seem to be here to stay. Cell phones equipped with motorized cameras have not suffered the same fate.the protagonists of this article where all those who are are not, but they are all who are.

Anyone who takes the risk of going against the tide of fashion has two possible destinations: to be the pioneer who starts the trend or to discover that for one reason or another, the idea did not turn out to be so good. I have to say that I know people who have a cell phone with a motorized front camera and there they are, the cell phone and the selfie bump, both in good condition. What no longer exists are the pop-up cameras themselveswhose growth can (at the very least) be limited in the 2018-2020 period.

One goal: the infinite screen

Be careful, it’s not that they started in 2018, because before, when Honor and Huawei were grouped in the same conglomerate, they launched the Honor 7i and the Huawei Shot X (the same model, but launched in different markets ). Other brands had reported this lead, such as OPPO and its OPPO N1 and N3 with rotating cameras. But let’s come back to 2018, more precisely to MWC 2018, the show where we discovered the concept of the Vivo Apex, a phone capable of deploy its front camera in 0.8 seconds to reach 98% screen.

From a concept we moved to a reality sold in Europe: the OPPO Find In Xataka’s analysis the module appeared as one of the arguments againstdue to its lack of practicality, which translated into a slower experience both for unlocking and for photography, a section where it fell below what was expected due to its proposal.

Xiaomi has also embarked on the adventure of pop-up cameras with its Xiaomi Mi Mix 3, another high-end with a sliding body to deploy the camera to avoid the notch, hole or other devices, thus achieving a impressive terminal to look at. Unfortunately, it also didn’t convince us functionally due to its slippery glass finishes and slow deployment time, labeling it as “half-defined”.

Vivo had already shown that it was interested in it with this concept of the Vivo Apex, so a few months later it materialized it with the Vivo Nex, with an in-screen fingerprint reader and a front camera inside a minimal retractable mechanism to obtain 86% unobstructed surface area. However, in our experience It was more flashy than functional..

The mechanism is debugged and begins to democratize

We saw that Xiaomi took a chance with one of its high-end ranges, but others like OnePlus threw all the meat on the grill with its OnePlus 7 Pro in 2019, where some improvement was seen in its retractable module for the selfie camera compared to which previous one, but still with the obstacle of It takes a second to unfold for photography or face unlock. At the end of that same year repeated with the OnePlus 7T Pro in a continuous bet.

Until now we found full-width motorized modules with minimal part, as you can see in the photos, but in the summer of 2019 a shark fin appeared with the OPPO Reno, a mid-range at the premium design and an improved mechanism compared to Find In summary: the mechanism of motorized cameras is changing for the better.

We’ve talked about relatively modern Chinese brands on the old continent, but the popularity of the motorized camera mechanism knows no bounds and Samsung is betting on it in a mid-range model: the Samsung Galaxy A80. And it does it in its own way: moving away from periscopic front cameras to install a reversible and ambivalent triple camera. The idea was striking and attractive, because it saves sensors and also allows the rear cameras to be used for selfies, but the implementation did not convince us. In a sentence: ‘what a good feeling with an almost infinite screen, but how impractical the module is‘. Samsung must have thought the same thing, because once and again.

More and more mid-rangers have emerged with some type of mechanism throughout 2019, such as Google’s Realme services; The OPPO Reno 2, OPPO Reno2 F and OPPO Reno2 Z with shark fin and pop-up mechanisms. Closing the year is the Motorola One Hyper, a mid-range from yet another brand which joins the train and other assets such as its software, the size of the screen or a fairly generous battery accompanied by fast charging for less than 300 dollars.

At a seemingly promising moment where they continue to permeate the different segments and ranges and no longer appear as a handicap in the analyses, motorized cameras closed forever. The year of COVID-19 was also one of farewells, a turbulent time in every sense of the word where everything stopped or irreparably slowed down, including launches. In this scenario, they were no longer present in high-end ranges like the OnePlus 8 Pro and also in brands that had relied heavily on them, like Vivo or OPPO.

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