Samsung

Notched displays are coming to Samsung devices

Ben Schoon | Nov 7 2018 - 12:59 pm PT

Samsung is one of the few smartphone makers which doesn’t use a notch on its slim-bezel devices. However, that may soon be changing. Today at its annual developer conference, the company showed off a few new ways in which it intends to further slim down bezels and… surprise! A Samsung notch is coming soon.

Many Android fans have given Samsung a lot of praise for avoiding the use of a notched display while just about every other Android OEM adopted the design, but let’s be honest for a second – a Samsung notch was pretty much inevitable. Just minutes ahead of the reveal of its foldable phone concept, Samsung talked about how it aims to continue thinning out bezels.

Following the Infinity Display of the Galaxy S8/S9 and Note 8/9, Samsung has four more concepts in the pipeline for this technology. They’re called Infinity U, Infinity V, Infinity O, and “New Infinity.” Much to the chagrin of many, two of these have a quite obvious Samsung notch in the display, with another adopting a “display hole.”

You can see the designs in the image below with Samsung talking about it around the 1:22:00 mark in its keynote.

Image Credit: Android Police

Infinity U appears to use a design which, at least in this image, looks about identical to Essential’s camera notch on the PH-1. The Infinity-V design has a similar concept, but it has a sharper look. As for Infinity-O, there’s no notch, but rather a hole in the display which presumably houses the camera sensor. The “New Infinity” design doesn’t have a notch or a hole, but it’s possible Samsung is teasing something here that it doesn’t intend to deliver anytime soon.

Regardless of what Samsung intends to do on its next few smartphones, it seems like notched displays from Samsung are in our future, despite the company making fun of them over the summer.