xkcd Phone 2000
xkcd Phone 2000
[The comic depicts a smartphone showing many uncommon features. The front view shows a mouse cursor and a circle in the middle. The side view reveals the circle as something like an old photo lens from 1900 extending far above the surface and four large buttons (camera lenses) at the rear. The third view is from the top and just mentions a "hollow ground." The bottom view looks like as it was opened by a can opener and shows a big USB connector and on the right a small black connection.] Dockless Silent Quad camera takes four copies of every picture Front-facing camera obscura 3D facial contour analysis shows you a realistic preview of your death mask Sponsored pixels Front and rear pop-out grips Humidity-controlled crisper Antikythera mechanism New York Times partnership: all photos taken with camera app are captioned in real time by reporter Maggie Haberman Spit valve Standard USB connector Coin purse-style squeeze access Hollow-ground Absorbent Keyboard supports dynamic typing Backflow preventer Swiss Army partnership: folding knife (unlocks only if Switzerland is invaded) 100% BPA-free PCB construction AMOLCD display (7-segment) Runs on battery for the first 6 hours, then uses gasoline Sharpie® dual stylus (dry-erase + permanent) Mouse cursor
Introducing The xkcd Phone 2000 We're still hoping this sounds like a futuristic number®®™®©™ ®
The stylus was previously called 'permenant'. This was later corrected, to permanent. You can still see the original image here

This is the seventh entry in the ongoing xkcd Phone series , and once again, the comic plays with many standard tech buzzwords, and horribly misuses all of them, to create a phone that sounds impressive but self-evidently isn't to even the most ignorant customer. The previous comic in the series 1889: xkcd Phone 6 was released 8 and a half months before this one, and the next comic 2377: xkcd Phone 12 was released five months later.
This time a nonconsecutive version number is used to match the milestone comic number 2000.
List of features (clockwise from top-center):
The tagline for the phone says that the marketing team hopes that 2000 still sounds like a futuristic number. It was common for a time to have futuristic science-fiction take place on or around the year 2000 (e.g. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Knight Rider 2000, Death Race 2000, Space: 1999), and many devices marketed in the late 20th century had a "2000" as part of their product name in order to sound futuristic. However, since the year 2000 was 18 years ago at the time of this comic's publication, this is no longer the case. The number 2000 also represents the fact that this is the 2000th xkcd comic.
The nonsensical trademarking of xkcd Phone slogans has become even more pronounced: as well as the inapplicable-as-ever copyright symbol, the slogan is listed three times as a registered trademark and twice as an unregistered one – and the second of those trademark signs is itself trademarked.
The title text refers to Retina Display , a term used to describe Apple products with higher pixel densities. The xkcd Phone marketing team would be unable to use the term due to Apple's having registered it as a trademark, as it would be a copyright violation. Additionally, the central fovea region is a portion of your eye's retina containing the most densely packed photosensitive neurons (confusing the biological retina with the electronics display of the same name). Foveated rendering is a genuine computer graphics technique intended to increase performance by rendering with higher quality to the regions of the display where the user is looking, and lower quality at the edges of vision; it is expected to be useful for virtual reality (one of the uses for cell phones) as a way to deal with the required high pixel densities while managing power consumption. There are displays with variable density, in specialist uses, but such a feature is not practical in a phone because the whole area of the display is typically useful and needs to provide high resolution (as the user's eye moves across it). Also, hundreds of pixels per inch is not considered a very high resolution, as a full-hd smartphone has 440.58 pixels per inch .
[The comic depicts a smartphone showing many uncommon features. The front view shows a mouse cursor and a circle in the middle. The side view reveals the circle as something like an old photo lens from 1900 extending far above the surface and four large buttons (camera lenses) at the rear. The third view is from the top and just mentions a "hollow ground." The bottom view looks like as it was opened by a can opener and shows a big USB connector and on the right a small black connection.] Dockless Silent Quad camera takes four copies of every picture Front-facing camera obscura 3D facial contour analysis shows you a realistic preview of your death mask Sponsored pixels Front and rear pop-out grips Humidity-controlled crisper Antikythera mechanism New York Times partnership: all photos taken with camera app are captioned in real time by reporter Maggie Haberman Spit valve Standard USB connector Coin purse-style squeeze access Hollow-ground Absorbent Keyboard supports dynamic typing Backflow preventer Swiss Army partnership: folding knife (unlocks only if Switzerland is invaded) 100% BPA-free PCB construction AMOLCD display (7-segment) Runs on battery for the first 6 hours, then uses gasoline Sharpie® dual stylus (dry-erase + permanent) Mouse cursor
Introducing The xkcd Phone 2000 We're still hoping this sounds like a futuristic number®®™®©™ ®
The stylus was previously called 'permenant'. This was later corrected, to permanent. You can still see the original image here
