With the Galaxy S10’s punch-hole display, Samsung took a different approach to avoid the notch while Apple just went ahead and embraced it. But that was just the beginning as Samsung is working on completely eliminating the punch-hole by moving the camera under the display.

By doing this, Samsung is looking to create the “perfect full-screen” smartphone. The vice president of Samsung Display’s R&D group, Yang Byung-duk, said that while the technology to create a full-screen smartphone won’t be ready in the next 1-2 years, at least the technology can advance so much that selfie cameras can work from under the display.

While we have already seen the likes of the Honor View 20 ship with a punch-hole display, they feature an LCD display. The Galaxy S10 is the first smartphone to feature an OLED panel along with a punch-hole cutout. And that, as per Yang, is a milestone in itself.

“Galaxy S10 is the only smartphone that has a hole in OLED display itself,” Yang pointed out. “Hole display is not one of the design options, but it is a noteworthy achievement in terms of the display technological advances.”

Like LG, Samsung also considered developing a Crystal Sound OLED display in which the display could act as a speaker. Previous reports have made it clear that the Infinity-O display is just the first step from Samsung towards a full-screen smartphone. While the company can place the selfie camera under the OLED panel even with the existing technology, the image quality takes a serious hit. Samsung is still developing the technology to ensure that the image quality is not affected in any way.

Our Take

Smartphones OEMs have been taking a different approach to completely eliminating the notch. While Apple embraced it and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, Chinese OEMs have gone ahead and come up with pop-up selfie cameras and a slider mechanism design. The problem with Apple is that it uses the notch for its TrueDepth sensor which is required for Face ID. So, Apple needs to figure out a way to not just move the camera under the display but also hide the TrueDepth system and that might not be that easy.

[Via Yonhap]

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