Farewell to notches and hole-punches? ZTE expected to announce mobe with under-display camera next month Chinese smartphone maker ZTE is expected to introduce the world's first commercially available phone with an under-screen selfie camera next month. The device, dubbed the Axon 20 5G, isn't necessarily the first among demos, but it's the first that'll be sold in shops. As we saw last year, Middle Kingdom mobile giant OPPO has …
Rear camera can be useful on occasion in those times when you don't have a camera but need to record something
But if you're not in the selfie obsessed demographic then front camera not needed.
Wonder if there's any stats on how many people actually make regular, widespread use of selfie cameras
Obligatory comic: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20141112
I use the front camera like that, as a mirror mostly, and the occasional (every few months?) video chat with someone.
What would be nice is a return to the two-screen phone idea (RAZR V3 and V9, Samsung Upstage come to mind), with a smaller display on the back so you can put a blast shutter/flip cover over the main display and still see a reminder/check time.
It looks like Motorola is doing a second screen on their newest RAZR as well, but I don't trust folding displays yet. My guess, is besides the nod to the olde designs, they kept the second screen to reduce the frequency of open/close cycles and keep the wear down.
Motorola also has the pop-out camera thing on a few of their newer mobes, but I can see that getting broken or gummed up rather easily.
Does it get in the way of a rugged case? I was side-eying that that as less-spendy option to the Edge+ for when the inevitable happens and I need a new device.
I'm running a first gen Z Force in an otterbox currently, with a glass protector over the plastic display, because industrial machinery has no mercy...
I've not tried it with a ruggedised case as I have no need for that. However, a case designed for that phone will most certainly take it into account.
One other thing for Motorola, they provide a rubber case with their phones, and to date I haven't lost a screen yet from accidentally dropping the things.
I use my phone camera an absolute fuckton for documenting things.
For example, I used it to capture how the right switchpod of my bike looked before I disassembled it, and then various stages of that disassembly. I only needed the pictures for about 3 hours, but they were invaluable when I was putting it back together.
Friday I took a picture of where a router was supposed to go, to demonstrate it wouldn't fit there to the boss.
Phone cameras are worth their weight in gold.
Don't understand the downvotes, I would just like the option to buy a 'proper' smartphone without any cameras. I am not suggesting that ALL phones come without any cameras as obviously our use cases are different. All I use my phone for is to make calls and text, and test apps on. The tablet is only used to consume media and test apps on.
For skype/teams calls and recording tutorials for my students I absolutely use my laptop camera, surface go camera or webcams(for the main machine) and could not live without them, but the camera on my phone is for me a waste of time/effort/energy/money, and it annoys me no end that 99.9% of reviews for a new phone is how good/bad the expletive camera is.
I occasionally find the front facing camera very useful on my phone. Not for selfies but for those situations where you need to see somewhere you can't get your eye to but you can squeeze the phone into. I use the main camera a lot more for these jobs, but sometimes you need to be able to see the screen while aiming and sometimes that requires the front facing one.
Yes, but you are probably not a chronically self-obsessed teenager who must always be sending selfies to various boy/girl friends at 2am. My eldest refuses to put her phone on silent (imagine that for 5 months lockdown) and we can hear every time her friends send another picture .. I often wonder if they sleep at all.
Since I have had a camera with a front facing phone, I have used a front facing phone, taking into account facial and iris recognition on top of regular selfies, a total of zero times. And yet I have to accept that my display has a bloody big hole in it that I can't get rid of.
I'm sure it's of some use if you're so self obsessed that every scene you photograph simply must have your distorted face obscuring it, but for what I choose to call "normal" people, what is the point? And why is there no alternative on flagship phones?
Would literally pay a bit NOT to have a front-facing camera, or to just have it ABOVE the screen.
Why do we need all this seamless junk? Give me a few mm physical bezel around the screen (less likely to crack), and then put the camera, sensors, etc. ABOVE it and a button BELOW it.
There are literally features on modern smartphones I would pay not to have, and others I would pay to have.
I'll pay not to have Siri / Alexa / etc.
I'll pay not to have a stupid integrated screen but just a plain, square bit of touch-glass.
I'll pay to have a removable battery.
I'll pay to have protective corners and a phone that DOES NOT NEED a case to keep it safe. Seriously. It's like giving people a car and then telling them they need to put bumpers on it.
I'll pay to have a headphone socket, even if the phone gets longer.
I'll pay to have PLAIN, STANDARD Android with no apps.
The market is atrocious for phones and just does not understand what I want as a consumer.
The closest I can get is a Samsung XCover Pro. Rugged, waterproof, removable battery, dual-sim (if you buy the right one), headphone socket, etc. but it has a fingerprint reader that I don't want... a selfie camera notch I don't want, multiple cameras on the back that I don't want, and it doesn't do MHL / Dex over the USB-C port (which I would pay for). I'd literally pay to have the S4/S5 mini IR blaster put back on it too.
That's because you aren't sufficiently numerous to be considered the consumer. Neither am I. Neither are probably most of the commenter on here.
The consumer is the person obsessed with documenting every aspect of their life with their phone. They are the ones who use the front camera; who don't care about replacing the battery when it dies after a couple of years because they'll just get a new phone; who are driven by feature count and fashion rather than function.
And there's billions of them out there...
I think it's far more like "HD/4K/3D etc.". Everyone wants it because it's there. Now that everyone has it, and either doesn't really use it or doesn't need anything more, it's started back going the other way.
People aren't gonna buy a new mobile every year in perpetuity. They aren't getting that much faster or better each time round any more.
Compare even an old Android with a new one, massive difference. Compare a new one with its competitors? Not much difference. Every phone has almost every option because they have to do that to compete. Nobody's going to buy a phone without GPS any more, for instance, even if they hardly ever use it.
And if you're not needing to buy a new phone, then you want one that'll last longer. Removable batteries are coming back. You can say "ditch headphones", maybe, because USB-C still allows that functionality and Bluetooth has obsoleted it. But when it's something that another function *doesn't* provide, then it becomes far more useful
It's not that phones won't still have 10 cameras. It's that ALL phones will have 10 cameras. So who cares about a phone with 11 cameras? And when a camera is "good enough" for selfies, then why does it need to be in the screen itself as a visible blob of obstruction?
There's only one generation that are really doing all the selfie-stuff, and that generation are nearly growing out of it. The next generation and the generations before don't really care about it.
We've reached saturation. The only way to distinguish is to give people things other phones don't have, or to make their phones different in some way.
"Or, in short, phones have now turned into fridges. They all do the same thing,"
And so the manufacturers add overpriced and unreliable shiny gimmicks to them to try and differentiate their product.
People aren't gonna buy a new mobile every year in perpetuity.
Well MrsConfused used to buy handbags every year, often she'd buy several (thankfully she's cut back on that habit).
For some, phones are fashion accessories and as long as the manufactures can persuade enough punters that they're fashion items then they'll keep selling more.
Other people dread the idea of getting a new phone and all the hassle associated with either beating it in to working the way we want or being beaten by it into suffering the way it wants to work.
Had to scroll up to see if it I had posted this and forgot about it.
One more downside for the Xcover Pro: it's not on AT&T's VoLTE whitelist, so (supposedly) it's going to stop working for voice calls in the US by February 2022.
I doubt I'll be buying a new phone by then, so unless AT&T gets it together, I guess I'll switch carriers for a while.
Me too! The combination of an S5 with the IR blaster, TVBeGone for Android and a GoodGuys store full of televisions was more fun than a trouserful of ferrets.
And the remotes were always locked up together in a box out the back, with hilarious results.
Going to call out the further implications of this tech?
Think having anything with a screen capable of having a camera hidden behind it.
Some would make sense - camera hidden in a cash machine/ATM/hole in the wall. Bezel-less laptop screen without the F7 key popup hack for the webcam.
To the less pleasant, things like bus stop screens, tourist information screens, ads in shopping centres. To truly unpleasant like that big widescreen TV in your hotel room.. Or the screens in toilets like in service stations.
Me, I like knowing where the damn camera is.
Big Brother because with this he truly could be watching you.
Bus stop screens, tourist information screens, ads in shopping centres - why would they need to hide a camera, you're probably on CCTV anyway?
As for blatantly illegal ones like 'that big widescreen TV in your hotel room' why would they need to hide it in the TV given the scores of minute spy cameras you can get nowadays - probably get better angles too.
In all of your scenarios this technology offers nothing a pinhole in a dark bezel that could be anywhere nearby wouldn't already do.
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