as the performance improvements in each new generation of smartphones have
dwindled engineering and marketing departments alike have looked for new
ways to quantify just how great their
latest gadgets really are now before we had the races for
more megapixels thinner chassis and ever
greater pixel density displays with all
of these eventually reaching the point where they actually caused as many
problems as they solved and lately it's been all about screen to
body ratio and boy has this one ever resulted in some
ugly ducklings thankfully it's almost over
and i'm gonna tell you why with glasswire you can instantly see
your current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving
apps on your pc or Android device use offer code Linus to get 25 off glassware
at the link below
so the current goal for pretty much every modern smartphone manufacturer
seems to be to build a phone with bezels
so thin that they're effectively not even there i'm sure some of you are
already drooling at the thought of an all screen phone but others might say
well it's kind of stupid aren't bezel small enough as it is
and those people have a point for some of the folks out there bezels
have already gotten so small that they can make it more difficult to use the
phone like if you're reaching across with your thumb while typing one hand in
the thing is that you need a little bit of bezel in order to hold onto your
device and there's got to be a little bit of non-sensitive part there because
skin is not hard it's soft and it kind of mushes onto it
now this is something that's less likely to come up in portrait mode but i've
actually noticed that it can be uncomfortable to hold a phone with tiny
or no bezels while watching videos or playing games
your mileage may vary though but in spite of these practical concerns there
is certainly some sex appeal if nothing
else to an all screen device so let's
take a look in today's video at the various approaches that manufacturers
are taking to get as close as possible
now the first thing that probably came to your mind is everybody's favorite
the notch it seems like everyone loves to crucify apple for
inventing this and you wouldn't be unfair to say that they
definitely helped to popularize the design but apple wasn't the first
company to utilize a notch that particular crown of thorns lies upon the
head of lg their v10 launched back in 2015 had
a massive notch in the corner for the front cameras now they kind of
put some spackle on this with a second display that was used exclusively for
shortcuts stats or notifications
so people really didn't see it as taking away from the main display hence the
lack of outrage the first screen to actually make use of
an in-screen notch was the sharp s2 as a
way to showcase their free-form display technology
freeform works by moving the display's driving electronics away from the edges
and into the screen itself allowing a display to be made into virtually any
shape a couple days later there was the slightly more popular essential phone
and then finally of course the iphone 10.
so why does the notch need to be there
well if you extend the display all the way to the bottom of the phone removing
the chin bar all you need to relocate is the home button which can be easily
moved around to the back or the side or
done through software without any real compromise to usability however when you
go to extend the display upward to remove the forehead you encounter a bit
of a dilemma the front-facing camera and sensors can't really be moved without
sacrificing some pretty serious functionality hence the notch
the next attempts to make an all-screen display were kind of a throwback to the
sliding phones of the early 2000s now there is some variety in the approaches
around this concept but they mostly fall into two types either some portion of
the back of the phone slides up exposing the selfie camera and or the sensors
like on the xiaomi mi mix 3 or the camera pops out on a little
nubbin like on the vivo nex now at first glance
this kind of seems like a no-brainer the perfect solution that just took a little
bit of backwards thinking but sadly there are a number of
downsides to either design with the biggest one being structural integrity
going from no moving pieces to
well any moving pieces will have some impact on the phone's
durability especially if your slider is motorized like on the oppo find x
and you're going to be kind of screwed if
the internal motors just stop working especially on this one because they also
got rid of the fingerprint sensor like apple
and that's before we can even get to the
other downsides like how would you make a case for this device and if you could
well how is that slider going to affect its susceptibility to water damage or
dust ingress now technically there is still time to
see how these devices hold up but in my book
honestly they're just kind of a dead meme at this point
i mean they're cool but which brings us next to a solution
that'd be obvious to anyone who thinks that people posing for selfies are a
bunch of narcissistic douchebogs
douchebox i like that douchebox
what if we just removed the selfie cam then who cares
the problem with that is that well then you wouldn't be able to take
selfies anymore but fear not vivo's solution to this is
what actually inspired us to make this video the vivo nex dual display is a
truly fascinating device as the name implies it actually has two
displays one right here on the front and another one
on the back so the idea is that when you want to
take a selfie you can just flip around the phone and use the rear display to
see what the crap it is that you're doing now it is a little bit less convenient
but i gotta say using your full fat rear camera to take
your selfies is going to seriously help you step up your instagram game and
what's cool is that the second screen also provides some extra functionality
like showing you the framing of the shot if you ask someone else to take a photo
for you so you can avoid that whole like hey can you take a picture for me and
then they take the picture and you like look at it and you kind of wait till they leave and then you ask someone else
because they're just completely incompetent it also allows you to quickly flip to
the other side of the phone to attend to random social media stuff while gaming
and some other things as well it's kind of cool but the current implementation
is still a little bit clunky not to
mention that on this particular phone there's this
massive weird camera bump that doubles
as a notification led ring i don't know i think a regular led on the back
probably would have sufficed so hopefully the next version goes with
that instead with all that said out of everything that's available right now
the dual screen approach to making an all-screen device is my personal
favorite even if there's still some work to do on the software side of things
i've already seen a rear screen used in other novel ways like on the nubia x
which handled switching screens really quickly while i was playing with it at
ces and used that rear screen to provide
extra rear buttons for gaming the issue though is that every one of these
solutions seems to make at least one compromise whether that's a less
intuitive experience making the phone an eyesore compromising durability or
adding thickness and or reducing battery life because the bloody thing has two
screens so back to that ultimate goal of a whole
screen phone the only perfect answer seems to be an
underscreen camera but at this time it looks like we're gonna have to wait a
while for that now we did visit lg displays factory in korea quite recently
and they were extremely proud of their approximately 50 transparency OLED
displays but given that issues exist with selfie
camera image quality already cutting the light transmission in half probably
isn't going to be a good time but progress is happening so under screen
fingerprint scanners like the one in the oneplus 6t and in the vivonex dual
screen here actually are very similar technologically to camera sensors just
with quality standards that aren't as high as you'd expect when you're trying
to snap a selfie in the club or whatever so
i'm still pretty hopeful but let us know in the comments down
below first would you have preferred that we had
gone with our original plan of just doing a normal review of this phone or
did you enjoy us using it as a prop to take a broader look at current all
screen display technology and second
what do you think is the best solution currently on the market
freshbooks is the small business accounting software that's custom built
for how you want to work it's a simple way to be more productive more organized
and to get paid faster if you're a freelancer or if you're self-employed
you can create and send professional looking invoices in less than 30 seconds
you can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to
four days faster you can see when your client has seen your invoice to put an
end to the guessing games and this is really cool you can take the whole
experience with you on the go with their fully featured apps for both Android and
iOS so don't take my word for it try out freshbooks today they offer an
unrestricted 30-day free trial if you just go to freshbooks.com tech tips
we're gonna have that linked below just make sure you enter Linus tech tips in
the how did you hear about us section so thanks for watching guys if this
video sucked you know who to blame it's always in the credits but if it was
awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to
buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is our merch
store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you
should totally join