ZTE wants to resurrect 3D with its latest tablet
ZTE wants to resurrect 3D with its latest tablet
You might have assumed that after the 3D TV craze and the Amazon Fire Phone with its 3D display completely collapsed, the tech industry gave up on 3D.
But it turns out one company is unfazed.
ZTE, the Chinese phone maker behind the Red Magic and Nubia brands, has teamed up with American artificial intelligence company Leia, Inc. to create a glasses-free 3D tablet.
Launched at Mobile World Congress 2023 in Barcelona, the Nubia Pad 3D is an Android tablet with a large 12.4-inch 2.5K LCD screen with a high 120Hz refresh rate, four Dolby-enabled speakers and a large battery of 9070 mAh crammed into its matte black metal frame.
I spent time snooping around the giant tablet screen and tossing around a few 3D apps on the MWC lounge. It’s cool, but it’s hard to see it becoming popular with consumers.
Despite the tablet’s unveiling in Barcelona, it’s already technically launched at CES in Las Vegas in January branded Leia as the Lume Pad 2.
All 3D intelligences are provided by Leia, a company that claims to be able to provide “an immersive digital experience with its 3D AI technology”.
The Nubia Pad 3D is identical to the Lume Pad 2, which retails for $1,099 – that’s the same price as the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Apple’s slate has the extremely power-efficient M2 chipset – much more powerful than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chipset that dates back to 2020.
Henry Burrell / Foundry
The metal and screen size make the Nubia Pad 3D rather big and heavy, but the payoff is a 3D screen that doesn’t require glasses, just like Amazon’s ill-fated phone and the insanely popular Nintendo 3DS consoles.
“3D has been around for a while, but now we’re enhancing 3D visualization and content creation with the latest in AI technology,” said Cecilia Qvist, CEO of Leia, Inc.
“AI takes the 3D experience to a whole new level, both in terms of viewing comfort and the ease of creating 3D content on demand – now a five-year-old can create and share stunning immersive art within seconds using the device.”
There is, however, a slight catch. You must use Leia-branded apps for streaming, gaming, and video calling. There is a whole Leia app store with apps to create 3D videos, convert TikTok and YouTube videos to 3D, and a 3D video call app.
If you want those fancy 3D video calls, you’ll have to get your friends and family to buy the tablet.
Since it was impossible for me to move my friends from WhatsApp to Signal – a free smartphone app – you have a better chance of winning the lottery than convincing one of your own to buy an expensive 3D tablet.
Henry Burrell / Foundry
After playing around with the Nubia Pad 3D, I can see there is some appeal. Preloaded 3D apps display various characters in impressive three dimensions, but you can only rotate them in a demo.
There’s a simple dungeon crawler app that looks a bit like a Zelda game from top to bottom, with visuals popping out slightly from the screen.
I took a photo with the tablet cameras in the app that claims to convert 2D images to 3D, but the end product was shocking, with 3D struggling to form. It hurt my heart a little.
The technology is quite impressive but probably not worth buying as a consumer, especially for the asking price of the Leia version, but the price of the Nubia Pad 3D is unconfirmed.
And after all, we had technology like this that was arguably more fun over a decade ago with the Nintendo 3DS. And it was much cheaper.
To be fair, Nubia is announcing the tablet at MWC as an enterprise product. The Nubia 3D Pad will be available for pre-order sometime in March, with availability in the Americas, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
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