the future of phones
Not every phone needs a notch. In 2019, smartphone design gets fun again
The next generation of phone design is arriving! Say goodbye to the notch, and hello to more screen space, and even folding displays
The smartphone camera notch is one of the more divisive design decisions of recent years. It’s designed to address a genuine issue: when phones are almost entirely made of screens, where do you put the frontfacing cameras and related sensors? Some firms have gone down the same road as Apple, with varying degrees of success at making the result look slick. But in 2019, the big phone makers are taking a big step forward, with new approaches to making this year’s handsets the most futuristic-looking tech of all time.
For a start, it’s good news for anybody who loved the Matrix Nokias of the late 1990s: sliders are back! Back! BACK! Honor, Xiaomi and Lenovo are all launching a design that leaves the hefty screens pure and un-notched, and makes the display itself slide down instead.
The Honor Magic 2 is a great example of the slider approach: its three(!) front-facing cameras are all hidden behind the 6.29-inch AMOLED main screen, and all you need to do is slide the screen down to expose them. It really works: you get all the benefits of an almost bezel-free phone without sacrificing on the camera front. An in-display fingerprint reader handles
The Honor Magic 2 has a “nearly 100%” screen-to-body ratio thanks to its slider
biometric security, too. Honor claims that gives the phone a “nearly 100%” screen-to-body ratio, compared to a mere 84.4% for the iPhone XS Max.
It’s a similar story with the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3: once again its front-facing cameras are concealed behind its tall 6.39-inch, 1080x2340 display, which slides down to expose the dual-lens setup. Lenovo’s on the case too: its Z5 Pro packs a dual-camera setup behind its sliding screen (same size and resolution as the Xiaomi). This enables the phones to achieve screen-to-body ratios of 93% and 95% respectively.
slide rules
The sliders here aren’t just gimmicks, as fun as they are. They’re practical solutions to a straightforward issue that affects all smartphone cameras: the more lenses you have, and the more performance you want, the more space you need. Nokia’s incoming and faintly amusing five-camera PureView 9 is an extreme example of that, but you get the idea: more cameras, more design headaches that need solving.
Rather than make a notch the size of a bathtub, Xiaomi, Honor and Lenovo have come up with a much more
elegant approach. But it’s not the only way to do it… you could drill a hole in the screen instead.
Huawei appears to have reached for the power tools: its Nova 4 has a little hole in the top left of the screen for its single selfie camera. Samsung has been thinking along similar lines for its Galaxy A8S, which has a new ‘Infinity O’ – presumably the O stands for Oh Look, There’s A Hole In The Screen – display that also stuffs its selfie shooter into a circle in the display, and we expect the Galaxy S10 to feature this as well. Not to be outdone, Honor has gone holey as well: the Honor View 20 has a pinhole camera too – this looks set to be the first on the market, and we’ll have a review next issue.
Bend me, shape me
Whether it’s a slider or a pinhole, the designs we’ve seen so far have concentrated on giving more space to the screen, but keeping the amount of body down. But there’s another option, which is to really go nuts and make the screen much bigger – and then fold it.
The Royole FlexPai is the world’s first foldable smartphone. Unfolded it’s a 7.8-inch tablet; folded, it’s half the size. It’s not the prettiest – it appears to have the ergonomics of a half-brick – it runs its own flavour of Android and it’s clearly a first-generation product, but it’s the first chance we have to see what using a folding phone could really be like. Parts of the screen can show different elements depending on whether it’s folded or not – we like its idea of using the ‘spine’ of the folded screen as a notification hub, so a call doesn’t interrupt your game or movie (and being a touchscreen, you could accept the call by tapping right there). We’re not sure it will ever see a wide release, though – we suspect Royole is more interested in showing other manufacturers what its screen tech can do (and then selling it to them) than making and distributing these products itself.
That means it’s probably up to Samsung to give us our first real taste of folding goodness. The Galaxy X (as it will supposedly be called) will be its first to use the foldable ‘Infinity X’ display tech, and it’s shaping up to be considerably less boxy than the likes of the Royole FlexPai, based on the glimpse we’ve had of a prototype on-stage at a Samsung event.
Samsung’s hardware prowess and the way it customises software well for the Note series, making use of the extra screen space for productivity, means we think it’s likely to make the best version of a folding phone we’ll see.
After years of increasingly indistinguishable smartphone design, 2019 looks set to be the year that things get interesting again.
The ‘spine’ can be a notification hub, keeping the screen clear for fun or work