For a few months now, a prominent Samsung insider teased smartphone designs unlike anything we’ve seen before, prompting us to wonder whether he was teasing the Galaxy Note 10 or something else. We know now that the Note 10 will feature the same design language Samsung used for the Galaxy S10, with a few minor changes to help customers tell the two apart. So Samsung’s next flagship can’t deliver the breakthrough design the leaker in question kept mentioning. However, he has now posted leaked images of alleged display prototypes that reveal Samsung has been working on phones with curved displays that don’t look anything like what we’ve seen so far from any Galaxy S or Note series phones.
The image below shows a stack of Samsung displays with curved edges that are a lot more prominent than what you’d see on Galaxy S and Note phones. The curve goes almost all the way to the back of the phone, although we’re not in wraparound screen territory just yet.
A display like this would let Samsung shrink down the side bezels to the bare minimum, and even eliminate the physical buttons on the sides of its phones. Samsung’s Note 10 was rumored to feature a radical new design like this, but the company reportedly ditched those plans and settled for a more traditional design. Before that, reports also said that the Pixel 4 would have no physical buttons, but Google then released an image of the handset that proved it also went the safer route.
It’s unclear whether these screens would feature an under-display camera or a hole-punch selfie cam like the Galaxy S10 and Note 10. Also, there are durability issues to consider for this extreme curvature. Can it survive accidental drops at least as well as the Galaxy S10 and Note 10? We’ll have to wait a while to find out.
Samsung has canceled this program, otherwise it will be the first brand to achieve full-screen v2.0, but it gave this opportunity to others, so its mobile phone business decline is not without reason.
— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) July 5, 2019
Ice Universe, the leaker who posted the image on Twitter, calls these displays “Full-Screen v2.0” and says that Samsung has canceled the design, at least for the time being, in a move that could give an advantage to its rivals that may be researching the same screen tech.
He added that the new screens would equip a flagship device from the Galaxy A series, calling the unreleased device Galaxy A100. Samsung has just released a Galaxy A80 mid-ranger and is expected to unveil an A90 version packing almost the same specs as the Note 10, high-end CPU included. Should Samsung introduce this extreme curvature with the help of a Galaxy A phone, we might then see it on Galaxy S and Note phones of the future, because that’s how Samsung is doing things now. Samsung’s smartphone innovations hit more affordable phones first before being refined for flagships.
