Nubia's Alpha is a ridiculous wrist-worn phone with a flexible screen

The Mobile World Congress is teeming with outrageous new mobile devices, like Huawei's foldable Mate X and gigantic Energizer phone equipped with an 18,000 mAh battery, but none was as ridiculous and also crazy that Nubia's surveillance phone Alpha.

Congratulations to Nubia for literally bending a 4-inch screen around a wristwatch to fit it on your wrist. But, wow, Alpha is ugly. It's more than hideous. And the software – it's so horrible that I wondered why the Alpha even exists.

I hate to be the guy who attributes the worst product of Mobile World Congress, but I think Alpha wins it without competition. The alpha is the perfect example of "just because you can, it does not mean you should do it".

Listen, I understand: flexible screens are a hot topic these days, and like collapsible phones that turn into tablets, they give insight into what's possible for new form factors and how many of our dreams come true. more crazy about science fiction.

But like, Ugh. Alpha is a fashion crime in every way possible. If the Apple Watch and years of horrible smart clocks in Android have taught us something, it is that design matters.

The Alpha's full-screen OLED 4.01 inch screen wraps up on one side of the watch group's metal links and on the other, and the clasp closes exactly like an ordinary watch. But just look at the clumsy sensor and the camera left and right.

Of course, the specs seem adequate – 4G connectivity, gestural interactions, WeChat video, health tracking and mobile payments – but all of this does not matter because Alpha does not work very well. well. Like at all.

You can scroll the flexible screen up and down to scroll through the various information widgets such as time and settings, but the user interface is so complicated that you will want to take l? Alpha and throw it in the trash.

Among the other problems, there was an upside down camera and a photo gallery far from being intuitive for viewing photos in dimensions as lean as the screen.

The Nubia can fool the Alpha's flexible screen, the Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage and a 500mAh battery as much as it wants, but at the end of the day, a big awkward phone watch only reinforces Apple Watch.

I am all for new form factors, but Alpha is nothing more than another prototype posing as a finished product. The durability of the screen does not inspire confidence either. According to Nubia, the screen can be folded 100,000 times before falling.

The price of Alpha is even worse: 449 € (or about $ 510). That's a lot for a portable device that is dysfunctional and looks extremely noisy, but if for some reason you do not care, you can take care of it when it's launched in April.