【Rapsa (2025)】

All those rumors that the next iPhone or Rapsa (2025)Samsung will be all screen in the front have a problem: No one's really sure how to dothat. You'd need to remove or redesign the camera lenses, the sensors and the speakers, and while none of it's impossible with current technology, it's still a daunting task to accomplish without major drawbacks.

A UK-based company called Redux appears to have solved a big part of the problem. During a live demo in Barcelona, where Mobile World Congress is underway, they showed me how their tech can turn an LCD or an OLED screen into both a speaker and a surface that responds to touch with haptic feedback.

And it does it all better than any of the smartphones currently on the market.

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Instead of moving the screen for haptic feedback or moving air to create sound, Redux's tech relies on actuators that create "bending waves," which create both sound andvibration.

As a test, a nondescript smartphone-like slab of plastic, glass and metal was placed on a table in front of me, tethered to an audio player with a cable. Then it started playing Pink Floyd's "Money," louder and more clearly than any sound I've ever heard from a smartphone.

Could this have been a trick? Yes, but the company CEO Nedko Ivanov assured me it's not. During the presentation, I covered parts of the phone which looked like speakers, but the sound didn't get any quieter.

For the ultimate test, Ivanov played a quiet voice recording on the device. It was hard to hear from a distance, but as I placed the phone to my ear, I heard it clearly. Then I flipped the phone upside down, turned it sideways, and placed different parts of its surface against my ear; the sound volume did not change.

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Redux tech turns the screen into a speaker, and a haptic surface. Trying it out here. The sound is actually coming from the screen. pic.twitter.com/VPAi6TzKk9

— Stan Schroeder (@franticnews) February 28, 2017

For the other part of the presentation, I was shown a tablet that gave very precise haptic feedback when I touched it. As my fingers moved over a virtual button on the screen, I could feel its edges. I pressed all sorts of "switches" on the flat surface, and they all felt different. I could even get a different tactile sensation when doing a multi-touch gesture with two fingers. And the tablet's screen (no hidden speakers, I was once again assured) played music while I was doing it.

It's an impressive one-two punch that solves a lot of problems current smartphones have -- it gives them sound without speakers and haptic touch without vibration motors. With this type of technology, an iPhone that's all screen on the front sounds like a realistic proposal.

I asked Ivanov and the company CCO John Kavanagh about drawbacks, but I couldn't get him to admit to any. The technology doesn't make the smartphone fatter; if anything, it makes it thinner.

"We pulled out more parts than we put in," Kavanagh said.

A phone or a tablet with this technology is not harder to cool, Ivanov claims. It's easier to waterproof. The technology works with an LCD screen, but it's even better with an OLED screen, which is what many phones are moving towards these days. You can make the sound come from the entirety of the screen, or you could make it focused, as if it's coming from one point.

I couldn't test most of these claims, but if they're true, Redux might have something interesting on their hands.

Redux is not a new company. In fact, it's gone through a few iterations, and it touted similar haptic tech back in 2013. But the smartphone part of the equation, Ivanov tells me, is very new.

Right now, Redux is focusing on smartphone and automotive industries. Asked about Xiaomi's Mi Mix, which appears to use similar tech, Ivanov said Redux has been in contact with the company but wouldn't go into details.

For now, the idea is to get the word out there, and get smartphone and car-makers scrambling to license the technology. From what I've seen, that's not a far-fetched possibility.

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Topics Mobile World Congress