It’s a great time to be a huckster. The arrival of a phone with a 3D screen, the Rokit IO Pro 3D, raises suspicions of some form of trickery. Is Rokit just out to lure in a few lesser informed folk who missed the “3D is dead” memo from 2016?
Kinda. The Rokit iO Pro 3D digs up the corpse of 3D video to see what blood it can wring from the poor thing’s putrefying flesh. And there’s not much left.
Even at £260, now considered barely out of budget phone territory, the Rokit iO Pro 3D is not recommended. However, it is fun to play around with for a day. That is not enough, but it is something.
A phone with its own 3D screen is different, but not new. We first saw 3D phones in 2011. LG made the Optimus 3D, HTC the Evo 3D. Both manufacturers promptly stopped, having sensibly realised 3D phones were not the future.
The Nintendo 3DS series is the one truly successful 3D portable range, but all of these devices rely on the same core effect of a parallax barrier. This filter restricts light from the screen at certain angles, letting your eyes see different images without 3D glasses.
It works. The Rokit iO Pro 3D can make images appear to sit behind the display panel, and a little in front of it. And as the phone has a 5.99-inch screen, it’s feasibly large enough to watch a full TV episode or movie on. A magician performing a few coin tricks is one of the phone’s 3D clips, and you can see the chap’s hand reach out of the screen. It’s “that shark scene” from Back To The Future II made into mildly disappointing reality.
What 3D content is there? The Rokit iO Pro 3D cannot handle the 3D content on YouTube, because that is either made for the “side by side” 3D of VR headsets, or classic red and blue 3D glasses. Rokit can’t, or doesn’t, perform the conversion.
Rokflix 3D, an app, provides your 3D viewing. It is an unabashed Netflix clone, one that frequently lags for not obvious reason, takes a short age to play any video, and occasionally refuses to play them at all.
Its clip library is also an issue. Rokflix says you can “watch three films a week and still have over 18 months worth of content,” from Rokflix 3D. There are actually 25 programmes at launch, some split into small segments to bulk up the numbers.
Some of the content is made by Rokflix’s own production studio, and much of it is terrible. Cook3d is a video of a chef making a pizza, and offers all the insight of standing in a Domino’s for three minutes. Heroes at Large 3D is a CGI superhero series with the script of an Adult Swim show written by 13-year-olds, and the animation of one of those deeply worrying YouTube content farms.
These videos aren’t worth your time, let alone a £260 investment. You’ll have to pay for some content in the future too. The app has a Store tab, with a “coming soon” placeholder. We doubt Rokflix will be able strike deals with any of the major movie distributors, so watching Captain Marvel on your Rokit iO Pro 3D one day seems unlikely.
Some of the content is enjoyable in 3D, but there’s nothing many would choose to watch, say on Netflix, were it not for the three-dimensional angle.
Other kinds of media aren’t seen in 3D. Games aren’t converted to 3D. And while a few companies like Gameloft did produce some stereoscopic titles to support the 2011 flirtation with 3D, they have long since left the Google Play Store. It wasn’t even called Google Play back then.
The 3D screen also causes issues. As the display style effectively halves the vertical resolution, the basic Android interface is downscaled to suit, leaving the Rokit iO Pro 3D looking much more pixellated than any other Full HD phone with an LCD screen. It looks like a budget display.
Its parallax filter makes certain kinds of object appear to shimmer, particularly the diagonals in “M” and “W characters”. The Rokit iO Pro 3D screen looks, well, a bit weird when displaying a lot of 2D content.
Tilt the phone back and forth gently and you’ll see the brightness seem to flicker up and down in waves, too, like a light sitting behind a slow-rotating ceiling fan. It’s that “invisible” parallax doing its thing again. You may need it for glasses-free 3D, but the screen does the Rokit iO Pro 3D no favours when doing other things.
Like most other lenticular screens, the Rokit iO Pro 3D’s also has a very narrow sweet spot. You have to look at the display dead-on, and at the right distance. Even with that nailed, you may find you get a mild headache after a while.
The Rokit iO Pro 3D’s display finish does not help here. For a great 3D experience you need to minimise anything that might stop your eyes from relaxing into the experience. The finger smudges and reflections of a glass touchscreen are enemies of 3D, so such content is best enjoyed indoors with a glasses’ cloth to hand.
This 3D screen is not hugely useful, the experience of using it is flawed and it hinders the other jobs of an Android phone. There is one other reason for it, though.
The Rokit iO Pro 3D has a dual rear camera, like most of its rivals, and it takes 3D photos rather than ones with a blurred background effect. This is fun to play around with. But, again, it’s a missed opportunity. You can’t choose the level of 3D effect, as you can in Nintendo 3DS games, or pull foreground objects towards the viewer, and “out” of the screen.
These 3D photos aren’t exactly useful, so maximising how dynamic they appear on the Rokit iO Pro 3D’s screen would be sensible. Too often they look a little flat. Actual image quality of the 13-megapixel sensor is fine but nothing special. There’s no particularly impressive dynamic range adjustment, and low-light shots are noisy.
Other parts of the phone are pedestrian, too. It has a Helio P23 processor. When not slowed down by Rokit’s poorly optimised apps, Android runs perfectly well for an affordable phone. However, you can tell its entry-level graphics processor is only just good enough to keep up. Asphalt 8 is slightly choppy at “high” visuals.
The Rokit iO Pro 3D also feels rather cheap next to a more conventional rival like the Moto G7. Its sides and back are plastic. They may be designed to look like glass and aluminium, but you can tell this is not the case as soon as the phone is in your hand.
Battery life is fairly good, so that’s not a problem. But there’s, unsurprisingly, no reason to buy the Rokit iO Pro 3D outside of the 3D screen, and the display just isn’t that compelling. What finally sinks its chances is something else, though. You can already try out 3D, and much more of it, with just about any phone. Just buy a cheap cardboard or plastic VR headset and you can watch an awful lot more 3D video, and use 3D apps, as part of a far more gonzo experience.
If the failure of 3D phones, 3D cinema and 3D TVs has shown us anything, it’s that 3D is more a fun gimmick than something you’ll want to experience every day. 3D is the present that seems great on Christmas day, but sits on the shelf idly for the next 12 months. But here the tech’s side effects keep reminding you of the sacrifices made for that frivolous novelty.
This is a crowdfunder-style device that was never crowdfunded. It has the flavour of a start-up, but the kind you right see leave empty handed on an episode of Dragons' Den. There are more oddities to the start-up sensibility, too. Buy a Rokit iO Pro 3D and you get a few months of Rok Life services, which include vehicle breakdown cover and personal accident insurance.
The idea of your phone-maker providing such insurance, presumably underwritten by one of the big names, is bizarre. And it smacks of a company desperate to make an extra dime off its customers wherever it can. This may work for Amazon, but it probably won’t for Rokit.
Verdict
The Rokit iO Pro 3D could be the world’s best high-street display phone, but almost no-one should buy one. Only a small handful of people used the 3D phones released in the West in 2011, and there’s still a mild thrill to watching a video on your phone that seems to extend beyond the screen itself.
But five minutes of enjoyment is about all it’s worth. While the 3D content available online is quite vast, the video you can play here is very limited. The screen tech actually degrades the visual quality of 2D Android, too.
Underneath, the parts that make the Rokit iO Pro 3D interesting, make this is just about a passable phone, but not one that warrants a buy. Steer clear.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
