Last year, Apple made waves in the smartphone design world when it made all-screen phones with notches socially acceptable. Although we’ve come around to the notch — it’s certainly better than big bezels — it’s clear that the notch is only a stop-gap, a temporary measure taken while phone companies work on getting a truly full-screen smartphone.
A handful of device manufacturers have actually achieved that already. The Oppo Find X and Vivo Nex both sport a full-screen design with some kind of motorized slide-out camera mechanism — basically hiding the notch inside the top of the device — and now Honor is making things more efficient by taking the motor out of it.
At an IFA 2018 event today, Honor teased the new Honor Magic 2. It’s not launching the phone right away — this was just a preview — but we did get some details about the unique physical design.
Basically, Honor is taking inspiration from the sliding dumbphones of yore to make a mechanism to hide the notch. That has allowed it to make a device that is nearly completely screen. It looks like it’s about a 6.1-inch display, and no doubt it’s OLED.
Inside, we just know that it will use the unreleased Kirin 980 processor, which should be about as fast as the new Snapdragon and Apple A12 processors. We also know it will have support for Huawei’s 40W quick-charge, which is always welcome.
It’s unusual for a phone company to tease a completely new device without any hint of a launch date or price, but that’s what we got from Huawei here. The race is definitely on to get rid of the notch, and removing the extra parts (and potential for breaks) of a motor is certainly welcome.
