Exploring the Persistent Presence of Notch and Punch-Hole Designs in Modern Smartphones

Quick Links

• The (Many) Screen Cutout Alternatives We Saw
• Why Everyone Seemingly Gave Up
• Will Screen Cutouts Ever Disappear?

By 2017, it was pretty clear that smartphone manufacturers were moving towards eliminating screen bezels entirely. Your screen was to take up the whole front of your phone. Now, we’re mostly there, except for one tiny thing—we still have a cutout where the phone’s front camera should be. Why is that?

The (Many) Screen Cutout Alternatives We Saw

It’s important to note here that just because we still have front camera cutouts today doesn’t mean that there was never an attempt to remove them. There were several, as a matter of fact. The ultimate goal was to have the front of our phones be a completely uninterrupted, bezel-less screen, with absolutely nothing disturbing our view. The problem was that unless you were willing to forego your front-facing camera (a majority of people probably wouldn’t agree to it), you needed to do something with it. That’s how we got cutouts in the first place—notches first, and then punch-hole cutouts.

Some manufacturers thought of and played around with ideas to remove the cutout. We saw most of these attempts between 2018-2020, mainly from manufacturers like OnePlus, Xiaomi, or OPPO, but also from bigger brands such as Samsung.

OnePlus

The most common alternative was a pop-up camera. Instead of having the front-facing camera located within the display of your phone, it would instead be located inside the phone and would slide up from the top of your phone’s frame whenever you needed to use it. If an app used the front camera, it would pop up and be lowered whenever you were done with it. Among phones sold in the US with this mechanism, we notably had the OnePlus 7 Pro in 2019.

Samsung

Other alternatives included phones with no front camera at all—the rear camera would instead “flip” from the back to the front whenever you wanted to use the front camera. This method was used by phones such as the Samsung Galaxy A80 and by phones such as the ASUS ZenFone 6/7/8 Flip.

Why Everyone Seemingly Gave Up

Some of these ideas were pretty cool—the rear camera is always better, so why not flip it around? But at a certain point, everyone just stopped experimenting and embraced punch-hole cutouts instead. No manufacturer actually gave a public explanation for it, but we can take a few guesses.

The most probable explanation is that implementing these methods rather than just doing cutouts was more troublesome than “smart.” Sure, the phones look pretty, but the pop-up cameras and the flipping cameras involved moving parts . Concerns about the mechanisms giving out and failing over time were probably exaggerated, as phones with these cameras are well alive to this day. But the fact that they were moving parts, and there was a whole internal mechanism for them, also meant that they took up a lot of internal space inside those phones. And this was at a time when, as a manufacturer, you probably needed every millimeter you could get for other components.

They also probably brought up the cost of manufacturing by quite a bit. If it’s not functionally any better other than making the phone debatably prettier, then there wasn’t any point to keep pushing it, especially if the bigger brands weren’t bothering with it at all (Samsung’s Galaxy A80 was just a one-off).

Will Screen Cutouts Ever Disappear?

Right now, it doesn’t look like anyone is actively trying to get rid of screen cutouts, but that doesn’t mean that no work is being done in this direction. The next logical step is under-display front-facing cameras, where the front-facing camera is under your screen and works with no cutout needed.

Justin Duino / How-To Geek

The problem is that they still need a lot of work before they can be a widespread solution. One example of a phone lineup currently doing under-display cameras is the Galaxy Z Fold range, as the foldable screen has an under-display camera. Even then, it’s not ideal. The latest Galaxy Z Fold 6 has a camera with a mere 4MP resolution, and it’s really low quality. There’s a reason you don’t see Samsung doing this in its other phones yet.

If we ever improve those, then we’ll have completely flawless, bezel-less cameras. Until then, though, it’s better to just deal with those annoying cutouts. At the end of the day, they don’t really change the experience much, and Apple has turned it into a full-blown “feature.”