Personally, I am not convince that the market has a place for sliders. But I know there are a ton of people who are a fan of the portrait slider form factor. Since my dream concept series all uses a similar design style, It’s not that difficult to come up with a slider. It’s just a pick and mix of my Z30 and Q30 concept, plus a bit of sizing. I took a short break from work to come up with these.
The device I did features a 4.5” display, at around 15mm thick. (Yeah, it’s pretty thick for a modern smartphone, but I genuinely see no way to make a thin slider device. The sliding mechanism needs space.) When close, the device is smaller than the Z10. When opened, it is quite a bit taller than the Torch 9810 since the screen has to be 16:9. To make sure the device doesn’t feel too top heavy, I tried to not slide the screen up too far up. Also, the thinner the screen the better. The thicker portion of the sculpted back should help with balance and grip a little too.
The device is almost similar in size to the Dell Venue Pro, just that it is shorter, both opened and closed.
The keyboard area will be slightly sunken in. So from side view, you can see the keys. Also, this will allow the keyboard to be a little less flat, and allow a bit more click to it. (Something which I didn’t enjoy on my Torch 9810 was the flat and rather stiff keys that doesn’t have much travel when you click it.)
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The elephant in the room. I see no way to fit a front facing camera into a thin sliding screen. The Torch and Dell Venue Pro didn’t have a front camera, which allowed it to be really thin.
To be frank it’s not exactly my dream slider, since it’s not my form factor of choice. Also I kinda feel like the slider should look different from the Z30 when the keyboard is hidden, even though I want a similar design language throughout the same generation of devices. But I really don’t have any ideas as to how at this point. So this is the best I could come up with at this point.
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