The smartphone you thought you couldn’t have – Slider mechanism

Sliding back into place

If you’ve ever used a phone with a slider in the past, you probably miss that satisfying feeling and sound you get when opening and closing the mechanism. So why did we pick an angled slider and not just a regular slider? Honestly, we’re big fans of the angled mechanism that was used in some Nokia sliders. The main benefits of this design are better viewing angles for the screen along with a more robust and solid mechanism. It also prevents the screen from wobbling when closed, a common problem with regular sliders. For our phone, we hired the same engineering team who designed the Nokia N97, E7, and N950. We tweaked this design for a larger form factor without compromising its strength.

F(x) Hinge Mechanism

Using state-of-the-art materials and engineering

We used a method called Powder Metallurgy (PM) to manufacture the slider’s metallic parts. This makes the slider mechanism stronger and more likely to survive a drop. These parts also have to be manufactured with very high accuracy (tolerances of < 0.25mm). Very few factories can meet these requirements, but we managed to find one. For reference, we require the same high standards used for some mechanical parts on high-end drones.

As with every other aspect of our handset, our goal with the slider mechanism is to make it the best keyboard phone on the market. We hope you’ll like it.

Join us again next week to discuss software….