A Samsung insider who is perhaps best known for sharing details about brand new phones well ahead of their official announcements is back teasing that some sort of breakthrough smartphone design is coming in the second half of the year. It’s unclear at this time whether he’s talking about a Samsung phone or not, but the leaker did say recently that Samsung will be among the companies to deliver this brand new design.
Ice Universe is the leaker in question, a constant presence in smartphone news. He posted the following Galaxy Note 7 images on Twitter teasing that a “better-designed phone” is coming later this year.
Why do you prefer Galaxy Note7? Is it because of its excellent design? Fortunately, I kept some photos of it. You will see a better-designed phone in the second half of the year. pic.twitter.com/O2YD92aWz2
— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) May 14, 2019
The Galaxy Note 7 represents Samsung’s biggest disaster to date. The phone was very well received, but then Samsung had to deal with a plethora of battery incidents, from explosions to fires. The phone was recalled and ultimately canceled, and Samsung had to deal with all the blowback. The Note 7 recall actually forced Samsung to delay the launch of the Galaxy S8 in early 2017, as it was still investigating the Note 7 and putting additional safety measures in place to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.
No matter how great the Galaxy Note 7 design may have been, it’s still a 2016 phone, and smartphone design has come a long way since. The Galaxy S8 was Samsung’s first phone with an Infinity display. That screen morphed into the Infinity-O screen of this year’s Galaxy S10, which is what we expect to see on the Note 10 come August.
Samsung (and everyone else in the business) has tried to continuously increase the size of the screen at the expense of the bezels. Some did with it notches, pop-up selfie cams or slider phones. Others put two screens on the phone. And Samsung created hole-punch displays. The first foldable phones were also unveiled earlier this year, with one of them stealing the show back at the Mobile World Congress in 2019. So we already have smartphone designs better that are miles better than the Galaxy Note 7.
How could Samsung or anyone else further perfect the smartphone design? The only thing nobody has done is to sell a phone with a selfie camera placed under the screen. That would be the perfect all-screen phone design, and something we expect to see in stores in the not-too-distant future. But is it ready for 2019?
Ice Universe seems to know something we don’t, and he’s not sharing more details about it. However, since he’s teasing it with the help of Note 7 pics, it’s easy to assume Samsung is behind this new handset design, and that the Galaxy Note 10 could be the device he’s referring to.
