Brace yourself! Notches are coming to Samsung phones

Samsung notch

While Samsung has, for months, resisted jumping in on the popular (and crowded) notch bandwagon as kickstarted by Essential Phone and popularized by Apple (with the iPhone X), the South Korean giant is finally making a U-turn.

At its 2018 Developer Conference which held earlier this week in California, the company made a lot of hardware and software announcements; one of the highlights is the OEM’s decision to finally adopt notches on its upcoming flagship phones to be launched in 2019 and beyond. It’s a good call, but it’s quite surprising (and ironical) to see Samsung turn towards this direction given how the company earlier mocked the concept of the notch in an ad aimed to throw shade at the iPhone X.

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Concepts of how the South Korean giant would design its notches were shown to the public at the event by Samsung’s Director of Product Marketing, Hassan Anjum. Notches on upcoming Samsung flagships will take three forms and according to Anjum, Samsung is using the notch be sure it want to reduce the size of bezels on its phones to the barest minimum.

“We’re going to keep going. The bezels are going to shrink even further” Anjum said.

Samsung Notch Concepts

In the coming months, expect to see notches on Samsung-branded smartphones in the following forms:

Samsung Notch concepts announced at the Developer Conference, California.

Infinity-U: this notch will take the shape of a oval-shaped cut-out split into half. This concept isn’t entirely unique to Samsung as it is akin to what Essential did with its PH-1 smartphone.

Infinity-V: shaped exactly like the alphabet ‘V’, this notch sport sharper edges and will also be placed in center position at the top of the display — like the Infinity-U.

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Infinity-O: this is a full circular notch which seems more like a hole in the display. It will be placed at the top-left corner of the screen and will look like what Asus is experimenting with the Zenfone 6.

Samsung notch

Leaked image of the Asus Zenfone 6

“We’re going to push the limits with our new lineup: the Infinity U, V, and O displays. These are new concepts that are just around the corner, and I can’t wait to tell you more about them,” said Anjum in his presentation on the display notches.

Aside from the above-mentioned three notch concepts, Anjum also announced (though briefly and vaguely) a certain  Infinity Display which seems to be purely screen with no notch. Details om how Samsung aims to achieve this wasn’t revealed but the company could use a slider or an Under-Panel Sensor (UPS) o hide the front-facing camera and other sensors beneath the display.

The concept of the notches are brilliant but it is uncertain if they will be coming to Samsung’s upcoming mainstream flagships or on its mid-range class — the Galaxy-A series, maybe. What we are however sure of is the fact that we might not be seeing too many Samsung phones with the traditional screen design in 2019; the notch is taking over!

 

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