The War Against Phone Bezels

[MR2 Fan]

I realize that smartphone companies are struggling to come up with new reasons for people to upgrade their phones, other than, of course, trying to slow down older models with software updates where people are forced to upgrade....but I don't know if we need this war on bezels.

My S8+ has a minimum bezel and the "home" button is integrated into the screen now, that's fine and it has a small bar at the top for the camera, sensor, phone speaker etc.

I think that's fine and I don't need to struggle with this wrap-around screen idea like the iPhone X has.

Is this all just "innovation" for the sake of changing something or do you all really want to have no more bezels?

[dodint]

I'm not a fan of edge devices at all. Since I switched from having a Note to carrying a smaller phone and a tablet I'm happy to have a bezel.

I also miss slider phones with physical keyboards. It's possible I'm just a dinosaur.

[Jason]

Personally I'm not a fan of on screen nav buttons, so I was happy with my iPhones, and now my OP5. I'm hoping more companies adopt gestures. Usability wise, I already think modern phone screens are mostly too big, and it's just worse now with a lengthened screen. One handed use is getting impractical. Hardware/looks wise, I like the current Samsung design best, but the idea of placing the cameras and status bar on the same line is a functionally efficient one.

[MR2 Fan]

I got used to the nav buttons on my S8+ because they can be changed based on the app, so I can understand a bit of having more functionality.

[Rare White Ape]

I’ve got an iPhone X. The notch is a bit of design wank, I’d prefer if either side of it was just left black and displayed its battery/time/etc in white. You’d lose a few square mm of screen space whoop-de-doo.

But having said that, the notch is generally not a problem 99% of the time and only becomes a problem when doing stuff in landscape mode, which it pretty rare for me unless I’m viewing videos. Thankfully it’s an OLED screen so the notch disappears next to inky true blacks of the pixels next to it. YouTube has a frustratingly shit way of handling it. Most videos are 16:9 and are displayed with perfect black side borders, which is what I’d expect. You can pinch out to zoom and fill the screen edge-to-edge; also what I’d expect. But if the video is encoded in 21:9 widescreen, it cant be zoomed or anything. The image is edge-to-edge, with the notch protruding on one side and slim borders top and bottom. The rounded corners of the screen cut off the corners of the image. It’s terrible. Looks like this (get ready for iPhoneception)

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/818/40121758624_99ebb3f43e_b.jpg

However Netflix has the right way to handle ultra wide video, ironically, by placing borders of equal with around the whole screen. It’s almost the perfect handheld viewing size, with amazing HDR display, and your fingers don’t cover the video when you’re holding it. Looks like this:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4771/26960975048_b882f13724_b.jpg

It’ll be beaten if Nintendo ever has a Switch hardware revision and uses a 2160p OLED HDR screen for ultimate in-bed viewing of Netflix and YouTube.