Weekly poll: are pop-ups better than sliders?

Our polls show that you love the motorized pop-up mechanism of the Oppo Find X, the smaller periscope of the vivo NEX S and the manual slider design of the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3. Now it’s time to pick your favorite. All three eliminate the need for a notch and bring other perks as well.

The Oppo Find X has a motor, springs and two ribbon cables (which you can see in the teardown), a pretty complicated mechanism that takes up a lot of room. The mechanism on the vivo NEX S is more compact, but no less complicated.

The Honor Magic 2 – a manual slider like the Mi Mix 3 – was recently taken apart and it looks much simpler on the inside. The sliding action is accommodated by two slide rails and a ribbon cable. That ribbon cable is the common element of all three designs and a potential weak spot – those have a history of being prone to failure.

Oppo Find X • vivo NEX S • Xiaomi Mi Mix 3

We have to confess that we’re not engineers. That said, we’d have guessed that the Honor will be the thinnest phone of the three or at least have the biggest battery. But that’s not the case, look at the comparison below:

There are other considerations. The cameras on the Oppo Find X are hidden when the pop-up is closed, which may appeal to the privacy conscious. But this means you have to wait for the cameras to go up before face unlock triggers – there’s no fingerprint reader on this one.

The smaller pop-up on the NEX S may seem like the better option, but it doesn’t have room for a proper earpiece and sensors. Instead vivo had to get clever and it put the ambient light and proximity sensors behind the display. That can’t have been easy (or cheap).

The Honor Magic 2 solves these problems by using an in-display fingerprint reader, the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 has a rear mounted reader. Both have plenty of room for sensors on the second half of the slider. And the manual sliding action is used as a gesture – to answer calls or launch the selfie camera.

For the wow factor, powered pop-ups are hard to beat. The manual slider seems more practical. Which design would you pick?

Pop-ups, sliders or bar phones

Large pop-ups (Oppo Find X) Manual sliders (Honor Magic 2)

Smaller pop-ups (vivo NEX S) Bar phones are better