Oliver Haslam·

This Is Our First Real Look At The RED Hydrogen One Smartphone [Video]

RED, the company you may be familiar with thanks to its super-high-end and insanely good video recording equipment, announced not too long ago that it would be entering the smartphone market with the RED Hydrogen One.

Aside from perhaps having the best name of any smartphone ever to be announced, the handset has a few interesting features that could make it a sleeper hit, although only if power-users decide that the $1,000 and upwards required to get into one is worth it.

Considering the only view we have seen of the thing is one press render, it has been difficult to get a feel for what RED has in store. Now though, friend of RED and YouTuber MKBHD, or Marques Brownlee, as his mother calls him, has been treated to something of a hands-on with some prototype devices and as you might imagine, he made a video about it.

While the video doesn’t go in depth too much given the Hydrogen One’s current development status and we don’t actually see one powered on, we do now have our first real glimpse of what the smartphone will look like. The answer to that is simple: rugged. That actually does not do the phone justice, because while it does look rugged to a point, it also looks stunning, that is, if you like boxy, rigid-looking smartphones, which I personally do.

During the video, we saw the 5.5-inch display around front with two speakers flaking a RED logo at the bottom of the device. The power button and fingerprint sensor are on the right, with two separate volume up and down buttons on the left. The reason for those buttons being split up is the design on both edges of the Hydrogen One, with a kind of finger grip-friendly situation going on. At first blush, it may look ridiculous, but the more you look, the more it makes sense.

Beyond all that, Brownlee also had a chance to see one of the additional camera mounts that can be used thanks to the smartphone’s modular design, and it is this that will surely draw people towards a phone that is far from inexpensive. RED told Brownlee that it should have progress on development in the next month or so, and we can’t wait to see what that progress looks like.

(Source: MKBHD [YouTube])

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