Rosie Grace: As the phone and laptop display full screen, the camera will be hidden

The quest for high-screen and body-ratio screen battles has drawn the dilemma of designing phones and laptops. Some Chinese companies have taken the lead in moving the camera, but not without compromise.

The release of the LG G6 last year, with its high aspect ratio and minimal top and bottom borders, provided a new focus on the screen-to-body ratio of engineering bragging rights.

The desire to minimize the visible edge of the device drove Essential and Apple into sinking into the display area - the area that houses the camera and other electronic devices. After launching the iPhone X, Apple talked about minimizing the gap component density as one of its greatest engineering skills.

However, all this is not just because of what it contains, but also because of its broader implications for other design decisions by device manufacturers. In the case of Apple, the war on the bezel claims Touch ID is a casualty. Although its alternative Face ID is sufficient to delete Touch IDs, fingerprint identification options are still available under certain circumstances. For example, many security zones require visitors to record video through a video camera.

Many Chinese device manufacturers have implemented clever solutions to the shrinking space for electronics on the device side. Millet was one of the first people to come out with Mi Mix's borderless phone design. Like the Essential smartphones that follow, it has a small "chin" at the bottom of the device.

However, unlike Essential and Apple phones, it has no flaws, but puts the camera under the screen. Dell uses a similar placement of its XPS 13's ultra-thin screen borders to create video-based chats that focus on the chin of any number of participants.

At Mobile World Congress, Huawei announced its attempt to replace the XPS 13's prominence as a monitor by the MateBook X Pro, which claims 91% of its screen-to-body ratio. Laptop screen left a small space for the front camera, Huawei has hidden in a function key row of a button, press the button will pop up.

If the idea of a pop-up camera can be used with a laptop, it can also be used with a smartphone. This is the highlight of the Apex smart phone concept from Vivo, one of the three smart phone brands owned by BKK Electronics, a Chinese smartphone giant.

Popping components from the edge of the electronic device is not new. It dates back to analog cameras in PCMCIA's heyday, modems and Ethernet connectors on laptop expansion cards, and even a pop-up mouse even in the weird HP OmniBook 300 of 1993. However, these hidden components are hidden to produce a more simplified profile or provide a degree of protection, which is not a problem for miniature cameras in laptops and smartphones.

Although these designs represent new thinking and include the attendant benefits of pop-up cameras that provide extra protection against hackers from secretly recording, it is hard to see such a design becoming a permanent escape route display.

For example, Huawei claims that the mechanism of an embedded keyboard camera can withstand a large number of switches, but such adjustment introduces a mechanical point of failure in one industry. The irreversible trend in this industry is the reduction of moving parts.

In addition, smartphones in particular, introduce potential points of entry for water and dust when Bluetooth, wireless power supplies and eSIMs are attacking the last barricades that seal smartphones.

Even though Android handset developers are starting to implement grooves that resemble the iPhone X - a phenomenon likely to continue as the new chipset better supports depth sensing, the long-term answer may lie in embedding the component in the display.

As I wrote about how other companies manage fingerprinting, Synaptics has demonstrated fingerprinting that works on the monitor and does not require extra space.

However, other components of the iPhone X, including the dual camera required for a depth-sensing webcam, remain a challenge that need to be dealt with by small bezel repositioning, stealth or in the last resort.

Rosie Grace

Tuesday, 6 March 2018

As the phone and laptop display full screen, the camera will be hidden

No comments:

Post a Comment