Photoluminescent materials isn’t new. It’s the stuff in your child’s ceiling stars, in outdated wristwatch dials, in each glow stick you’ve got ever cracked at a live performance. What’s new is placing that a long time outdated chemistry on the again of a flagship smartphone and letting the proprietor change into the artist as a substitute of the manufacturing facility. That’s precisely what Redmi did with the K100 Professional, and it is perhaps the one most enjoyable factor to occur to cellphone design all yr, principally as a result of it doesn’t take itself too severely.
The end known as Glowing Firefly, and it really works by hiding a luminescent layer between the cellphone’s glass again and its inexperienced ink coating, invisible in daylight and glowing wherever you level a flashlight or mild pen after darkish. Redmi launched the K100 Professional in China on August 11, pairing the occasion trick with a legitimately severe spec sheet that features a 185Hz OLED, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 V Sequence chip, and a 200MP digicam. The cellphone can sustain with any flagship on paper. It simply additionally occurs to double as a doodle pad.
Designer: Xiaomi
Redmi’s personal language calls the again panel a light-weight portray canvas, and that description holds up higher than most advertising and marketing copy tends to. Level a flashlight, a laser pointer, or a devoted mild pen on the glass and the fabric soaks up the power alongside the precise path the sunshine traveled, then releases it slowly as a glowing define. Write your identify, sketch a smiley face, signal the factor like a yearbook, and watch it fade out over the next minutes. There isn’t any chip concerned, no battery drain, nothing to cost individually. It’s nearer to a Lite Brite than to something Qualcomm builds, which is actually the appeal of it.
Nothing tried one thing adjoining with the Phone 2a Plus Community Edition, and I nonetheless take into consideration that cellphone. It used a inexperienced phosphorescent coating alongside the ribbon cables and digicam trim, charged by ambient mild and glowing softly by itself with none enter from you. It was quiet, tasteful, very on model for a corporation obsessive about making internals look intentional. Redmi took that very same chemistry and handed the pen to the person as a substitute of the manufacturing facility. One cellphone glows as a result of the designers informed it to. The opposite glows since you informed it to, and that distinction issues greater than it sounds.
None of this adjustments what the K100 Professional is beneath the end, a genuinely stacked gaming flagship with an 8,580mAh battery, 100W charging, and a cooling system constructed for lengthy periods. However the spec sheet was by no means going to be the rationale anybody remembers this cellphone. The reason being a inexperienced slab that permits you to depart a short lived signature in mild, fading like sidewalk chalk, passed by morning, prepared so that you can draw on it once more tomorrow.
