Smartphones with notches in the display are old hat… and now phone makers appear to be in a race to bring the first phone with a hole in the display to market.

Huawei and Vivo are both expected to announce smartphones this month with holes in their displays for the front-facing camera. And after teasing a similar design last month, it looks like Samsung plans to adopt the hole approach soon.

The Samsung Galaxy A8S with a camera hole is probably going to be unveiled next week. And next year camera holes are coming to the company’s flagship phones: say hello to the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus (allegedly).

A few different images are making the rounds. Samsung hasn’t officially confirmed them, so there’s a chance these pictures could be inaccurate or that Samsung could make some changes before it ships the phone.

But if you believe the leaks, what we’re looking at is a phone with a hole in the upper right corner of the display that’s large enough to fit two cameras.

In fact, it looks like the phone has a total of six cameras: two on the front and four on the back.

But what looks strange is a display that warps around the camera hole. There’s really no practical purpose to the tiny sliver of display above the camera cut-out. You can’t fit status bar notifications into that space. And any videos, photos, or other items shown on the display will just have a hole cut out of it unless Samsung implements a status bar the extends to the bottom of the hole… in which case, why not just stick with a notch or a bezel?

Anyway, with multiple companies working on hole-punch designs, it looks like this is going to be a trend in 2019, for better or worse. I guess if the phones sell well this design might stick around and if they don’t…. it won’t. But I wonder if whatever comes next will make any more sense.

On the bright side, rumor has it that the Galaxy S10 Plus will still have a headphone jack.

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11 replies on “Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus leaked: Dual front cameras make a hole in the screen”

  1. in which case, why not just stick with a notch or a bezel?

    Aesthetics. The hole looks a lot more integrated into the screen than the various notches have done so far — kind of like a widget or badge that you often see in one corner of screens of all sizes these days. At first glance, it does look a lot better than a notch to me (and I not particularly worked up about notches in the first place).

    1. My question is how do you compensate for it? Say you’re a full screen app, youtube perhaps, how do you compensate for a notch? Well, you slap a black bar down that side of the screen so it’s at least uniform. What do you do with a hole-punch? You again slap a black bar down, only this time it’s a bigger one since the dead area protrudes further into the main display so that there can be some display around it that while functionally useless makes it ‘not a notch’.

      I think a hole-punch is worse than a notch but I am in favour of corner-placement for notches so they’re less intrusive.

      1. No, you’re right.
        The notch tried to push the camera and earpiece to the corner to give more screen estate.
        This is actually more intrusive.

        Yet I do not care. I can take the rounded corners. I can take the notch. I can take the hole.
        What I can’t stand are aspect ratio’s greater than 17:9…. because that’s the real culprit in what is taking more of your screen space/making the device larger.

        Also, “edge sides” are bad, because they’re ergonomically worse than flat-screens, they also pose durability issues, not to mention prevent you from using Glass Protectors.

  2. What if the hole punch design evolves to a see through display that can let the Cameras still take pictures, but display normal images.

    1. I believe that’s the eventual goal, there’s been some patents floating around the past couple years of that with in display cameras, sensors, and fingerprint scanners. But my guess is that the tech is prohibitively expensive at the moment so we’re probably a couple years off before we start seeing that in some mainstream flagship devices. Until then though, the hole punch design kinda is a bad design though even if it’s a stepping stone.

  3. Why even have front cameras at all? I get that you want to take pictures of yourself, yet not everyone wants that. Samsung can drop the price $50 and remove the front cameras and have full screen all at once!

    1. Because you don’t release a flagship phone with something that a lot of people use left off the check list. “Doesn’t have a front facing camera” would not be treated as a positive in reviews, even if it came with an all-screen display.

      1. If Apple did it, people would be tripping over their dicks to call them innovative and forward-thinking.

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