The Notch contagion is spreading slower than phone experts thought Once thought to be one of the most contagious design features on a smartphone, the spread of the "Notch" appears to have been contained. GSMArena's survey of 150 phone models released in 2018 finds that only 22 per cent have been infected with the Notch. At the height of the outbreak, in the first week of March, over 20 new …
I have to disagree. Ideally the screen should cover as much as the phone's front as possible. It can't cover all of it at present due to to needing space for a camera, loudspeaker and microphone so it either has a notch or doesn't go to the top of the phone. I also want the symbols for reception strength, wifi, notifications, airplane mode etc. to almost always be displayed. What better place for them than either side of the notch leaving a dirty great big rectangular unobstructed area below for content.
Relax, as a left wing radical I find the comment hilarious. We certainly don't lack our own foibles, and comedy should be held sacrosanct.
Reminded me of the jobs guarantee platform idea that's been circling around lately, how in the world can you make it policy without serious implementation issues.
"And I think they should extend the display to the sides, the back, the phone cover, the charging lead and the box it came in. But what do I know?"
Give them time, there's a few technical issues to solve before they can put a decent display on a charging lead. A string of Christmas tree lights is just too low rez.
"Ideally the screen should cover as much as the phone's front as possible."
I disagree with this. I want a bezel.
"What better place for them than either side of the notch leaving a dirty great big rectangular unobstructed area below for content."
The space left over on each side of the notch isn't large enough to hold those icons, though. At least not on my phone, and I don't want to have to sacrifice functionality. That makes the notch an actively undesirable "feature" to me that would absolutely stop me from buying the phone.
Also, it's highly irritating from an aesthetic point of view, although that's a subjective thing.
"I disagree with this. I want a bezel." ......
Bezel's have almost been eliminated from modern TV's. People want a large TV screen not a large TV with a small screen in the middle of a fat bezel that seems to be there for no reason. It used to be where the screen illumination was housed. As technical advances allowed the bezel to shrink towards nothing people chose models with little or no bezel.
Are phones going to be any different? A bezel will provide some mechanical protection to the screen when the phone is dropped, so it has "some" value. It it hard to see why a fat bezel is needed top and bottom while a narrow bezel at the sides suffices. People like big screens on phones, but don't like big phones. Screens that cover as large as possible area of a phones front surface address this desire.
> It it hard to see why a fat bezel is needed top and bottom while a narrow bezel at the sides suffices.
Isn't it obvious? You generally don't have required hardware (front-facing camera, ear speaker and proximity sensor, and the once common hardware home button) in the narrow side bezels do you?
Well guess what I want a reasonable bezel too. Aesthetics aside (which are murder on my OCD requiring neat, straight and symmetrical things) it's annoying enough never quite knowing whether just grabbing or holding my (currently quite traditionally bezel-ful) phone on its sides will result in activating something accidentally - or quite the opposite, blocking an intentional slide because the phone senses my hand near the edge and it thinks I'm "holding" the slide...
>Bezel's have almost been eliminated from modern TV's. People want a large TV screen not a large TV with a small screen in the middle of a fat bezel that seems to be there for no reason. It used to be where the screen illumination was housed. As technical advances allowed the bezel to shrink towards nothing people chose models with little or no bezel.
The move to thin, bezel-free TVs resulted in the creation of a new market: the soundbar. Because it's very hard to get good sound out of something which is as thin and borderless as a modern TV. So arguably, they've actually lost functionality as a result of the drive for form over function.
Plus, there's a fundamental difference between a TV and a mobile phone. The former sits on a cabinet (or hangs on a wall); the other has to be held to be used. With large, capacitive triggering sausage fingers.
As such, with modern thin bezels, it's becoming increasingly easy to confuse the phone by touching multiple points on the screen.
My last phone was the Samsung S7 Edge with it's effectively bezel-free sides. I ended up putting it in a case - mostly for protection, but also because it was very difficult to hold it in both hands for photography: if your fingers touched the edges, it would refuse to recognise touches on the shutter button.
My current phone is an LG V30, and while it's not as bad for this, all too often the phone decides that I wanted to change the zoom level rather than take the photo.
So yeah: thinner bezels look nice, but please let sanity prevail!
Bezel's have almost been eliminated from modern TV's.
And this is a relevant comparison because…?
Almost all devices that we hold or pick up have bezels: phones, watches, books, etc. The bezel is as much a design feature as anything else. Otherwise everything becomes the interface and this inevitably leads to mistakes.
Everytime I hand my phone to my girlfriend to look at something she invariably presses one of the soft-keys by mistake. Something she almost certainly wouldn't do if the phone had enough tactile buttons.
The bezel on a phone prevents fingers from accidentally touching the screen, a problem not normally encountered during normal TV use.
People choose a phone based on many factors, the most common being "does the shop have it?" and "have I heard of it?". Popularity is not a good measure of practicality.
"I disagree with this. I want a bezel."
Music to my ears. I thought I was the only one left who preferred bezels. I'm not an Apple fan but the design of their "Plus" phones with a big enough screen and plenty of room for a dirty great battery is fine for me. A poncey looking device with a ridiculously high-res screen is not a lot of use when it's run out of juice.
> The space left over on each side of the notch isn't large enough to hold those icons, though.
The iPhone X and Asus Zenfone 5 literally put those icons on either side of the notch. So they obviously do fit.
Not sure if external links are allowed... but check here: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/4aRt3Y_7X91bQ2hVIKMh0dWO9nk=/0x0:2040x1360/920x613/filters:focal(781x497:1107x823):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/58897111/vpavic_180225_2340_0110.0.jpg
I dislike how they allow the phone background to extend up there though, making the notch obvious. They should do a black background so the notch is obscured.
The other issue is the status bar is also used to scroll notifications (not as common anymore I suppose) and the middle being not-a-screen breaks that. So you'd need a notification bar below that potentially.
"The iPhone X and Asus Zenfone 5 literally put those icons on either side of the notch. So they obviously do fit"
Different people have a different number of icons. The ones I consider essential nearly fill the entire width of the screen. There's no way they'd fit if there were less space, which means I'd have to get rid of some, which means that I'm losing useful functionality.
"Because it's pointless..."
Not from a marketing perspective, it's not. It's a design feature that's also a fad, and hence will date very quickly.
And in the fickle world of phone-fashion, that means lots of users will "need" to replace their crappy old Notch phones with newer, more modern-looking models.
If rather have the wireless charging. Bloody tired of having the usb port fail after a couple of years or get so full of fluff they might as well be broken.
Wireless charging has one big drawback. Try using your phone whilst charging. If you mobie is flat and you urgently want to use it, you're basically stuck hunched over some stupid flat thing rather than being at the end of a cable of one's choosing.
It also means having to try to find a mobile dash mount that's compatible with whatever random charging standard the phone uses, and then hoping it can transfer enough power to operate the screen, GPS, and streaming music app simultaneously. (This is over 1.5A on some phones I've had.)
I had wireless charging on my Nexus 4 and I can't say I was impressed. It never worked reliably. It would just kick in and out of charging mode.
"Try using your phone whilst charging. If you mobie is flat and you urgently want to use it, you're basically stuck hunched over some stupid flat thing"
Or use your Bluetooth headphones... Or speaker phone... Or message them. :)
Personally though, I'm happy with fast charging over usb c... then again, my phone normally has 70% charge at the end of the day so maybe I'm not the target audience anymore.
I don't see the point of wireless charging either, and the inefficiency sort of pains me too. So I want cables, as sometimes that's just the easiest way.
However I have seen phone connectors break. We had a batch of work iPhone 5s, and had 50% of the connectors fail, but I presume (hope!) that was just a duff batch. Although a bunch of them also had weird hardware failures within 2 years, mostly involving the battery charging / power level system.
Fluff can be annoying too. My Lumia 735 is great, because you can get the back off to clean it. But I've had to defluff various friends' badly designed phones - with a torch, magnifying glass and jewellers screwdrivers (as they were the only thing small enough to get into the gaps).
I don't see the point of wireless charging
Use in a domestic setting might be moot, but there are plenty of settings where it makes a lot of sense, especially public spaces where charging is provided as a matter of courtesy such as airport lounges. The cabling for charging mats is simpler and less fragile than providing more powerpoints, though obviously USB-ports are also good if also a potential security risk.
If I'm travelling for any period where I think I need a device while it's charging I use a powerbank.
"Wireless charging has one big drawback."
It has another big drawback as well -- wireless charging is only about 75-80% efficient (best case), so 20-25% of the electricity it's drawing is wasted. That might not sound so bad when you're thinking about a single charger, but if you anticipate a day when everyone is doing it, the loss is absolutely horrible.
"wireless charging is only about 75-80% efficient"
Which is a big problem for me, I charge my phones from a solar powered battery, and it's the middle of winter on this side of the planet. At this time of year, due to the position of the large house next door relative to the only useful place I can hang my small solar panel out of a window, I don't get much sun past 3 PM, none at all past 4 PM. During summer, the sun sets further south, where there is empty street, so I get lots of strong sun until the late sunset. So this time of year I sometimes have to be careful with my phone power usage, especially if there's lots of cloud. Wireless is out, too much power loss, I don't like it anyway for the reasons others have pointed out above.
If I was living at the north end of the building, this would not be a problem. I have to move in the next two months, sun position in winter will be one of the selection criteria for the new place.
I have successfully kept three phones entirely solar powered using my little panel and battery for several years. The last two, the only time they where not solar charged was at the factory, they had a charge in them when I bought them new. The same with any Bluetooth devices I use with them.
Wireless charging has a second drawback - it is inefficient, and the coils in the phone produce a decent amount of heat. Heat which reduces battery life.
Although, with user-replaceable batteries being a thing of the past, I guess Apple and Samsung make more money when the user has to upgrade their phone because of a cooked battery?
> Try using your phone whilst charging.
If I'm using the phone and not using the PHONE, it is pretty easy. The charging docks have flat and upright options.
For the phone itself, speakerphone or a headset is the best bet. I've got some Jabra headphones with a built in mic that work well around the house. Bit bulky for travel though.
How am I supposed to charge my phone when its in the third party cradle in my car being used for GPS if it has to lie flat on a charging pad? How am I supposed to charge it from a power bank when Im out and about?
I've never had a USB port fail - its always the plug that fails by design. I dunno what you're doing with your phones...
My kids have wrecked a couple of usb connectors over the years, I have once as well. Basic human clumsiness. The engineering design of both the old and new connectors is seriously flawed. They're way too fragile. Should have been implemented as a modular unit that could be easily swapped out by users, but that would have added pennies to the price of each unit!
"I've never had a USB port fail - its always the plug that fails by design. I dunno what you're doing with your phones..."
Depends how old the phone is - IIRC in the days of mini-USB it was the socket that tended to fail, which was one of the reasons why micro-USB was redesigned to make the plug the weak point.
Also, micro-USB sockets, like any other uncovered recess on a device which spends significant amounts of time stuffed into a pocket, are far from immune to ending up getting themselves well and truly clogged solid with compacted crud. Again, this might not be a problem if you're in the habit of getting a new phone every year or two, but if you do find yourself hanging onto a phone for longer than this then there's a good chance the build-up of crud will start to reach critical levels, preventing the plug from mating cleanly with the socket.
Annoyingly, unlike lightning sockets where I first encountered this problem, micro-USB sockets are bloody difficult to clean out properly due to the contacts being on that central finger rather than arranged around the edges of the socket - you need a rather thin crud-hoiking-out tool to squeeze past this without causing it to bend alarmingly off to the side, but said tool still needs to be sturdy enough to then be able to make a dent in the layer of crud.
And of course, even if the socket and plug combo is designed so that the socket never clogs up, and the plug always wears out first, the socket is still soldered onto the PCB inside the phone, and will almost always only be held in place by those solder joints - you might get some assistance from the way the phone case wraps around the socket body, but every time you ram a plug into the socket, or yank a plug back out of the socket, you're stressing those joints, and sooner or later they're going to give way. If you're lucky they'll do so in a way which means you can still use the socket so long as the cable is held at just the right angle to push the broken joint back together, but if the break is bad enough then it's a case open repair job...
Even wireless charging requires a wire for the section between the power source and the wireless "base station" thingamajig you rest the phone on.
They could extrapolate their proprietary bullshit dollars from those things just as well. Deliver the wireless cake, and eat your bucks, as it were.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
