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Screens without holes in them.
I'm a Xperia weirdo because the one I have still rocks a 3.5mm jack, expandable storage and a camera outside the screen. Not only are some of those gone from this year's equivalent, but it is 1500 bucks now, which is absurd. I went to a phone search engine and looked up that exact feature set and it turns out there are exactly zero phones that include those now.
I genuinely don't understand why people think the way to compete with Samsung is doing a worse version of their exact product. It's so dumb. Or maybe it's true and it's the people who are dumb. Because everybody says these things, but people seem to buy candybars with puncholes and no physical headphne support or expandable storage or IR blasters.
I hate how the camera on my phone blocks part of the screen. Can't they just have the lens a bit higher up
Because too many reviewers and buyers complained about "foreheads" and "chins". As soon as the big makers went edge-to-edge in all four directions with notches/holepunches for cameras everyone else hopped on the bandwagon.
I have never understood this argument. The camera never blocked the screen. The screen moved up and around the camera. It's either that, or you get a forehead/chin.
What do you people want? Pick one.
I don't want a camera in the first place. I haven't taken a selfie since 2014.
But if you're going to have one you don't need a forehead/chin. My Xperia can fit a camera in a "forehead" of under 2mm. Thinner than most punchholes and on par with the "forehead" of many mid-range phones WITH a hole. And it gets more room for a full second front firing speaker, to boot.
They could have spent all this time making the "forehead" thinner like that. Instead, they obsessed with fitting the body to the screen and added an annoying hole to it. Typically one that is deeper into the screen than a small camera space would otherwise, so if you want to give up the screen space to avoid the distraction you end up with a WAY bigger "forehead" than my Xperia has.
So no, punch holes and notches are dumb, they don't expand the screen meaningfully and they provide no functionality. They're a bug, not a feature. I'd take an under-screen selfie camera at most, and those are very rare these days, too.
And people wonder why the Xperia costs so much lol. That shit costs a lot of money to properly engineer, money most people don't want to pay.
It certainly doesn't cost more than an under-screen display where you need to both engineer a tiny screen of less dense see-through pixes AND the right setup to counter the blur you induce on the software side.
All the Xperia needs is a camera small enough that you can put it right against the top edge, so... I mean, it's not going to be a huge high resolution sensor, but it's good enough for what it needs to be. It's certainly not the major driver of cost for the device. The rear tele camera that has a movable optical zoom is probably a bigger issue (and not particularly good, they could have gone with something cheaper).
But that's my point. It's cheaper to just build the screen around the camera.
See what I did there? The camera never removed screen real estate. The screen never had that real estate to begin with, unless it was engineered in a way that allowed it, which is not common yet.
I used to hate the notch - until I bought a OnePlus 6. Only then did I understand that the camera didn't cut into the screen, rather the screen grew around the camera. The holepunch is an evolution of that. Apple made it work for them with the whole "dynamic island" thing, and at this point nobody really seems to care about the cutouts anymore anyway. Except for a few overly vocal morons online.
Don't get me wrong here - I'm not arguing for holepunches and notches to stay forever, and progress in that area should be appreciated and more widely adopted. That said, I'm getting really fucking tired of seeing the same "holepunch/notch bad because Xperia exists" argument hashed out over and over again. That Xperia is $1500, and the fact that it's not a Galaxy or iPhone puts it at a massive disadvantage already. The average person has never heard of Xperia devices, and refusing to consider that viewpoint puts your argument at an even further disadvantage.
I do not, in fact, see what you did there.
You need a small camera to put it on a small bezel. But also, you need a small camera for a small punch hole, which is something that all flagship devices actively try to follow.
It's clearly true that the camera removes screen real estate if the screen of the Xperia 1 and the screen of the other phones have the same aspect ratio and size (the Xperia 1 is on the small side of modern flagships, but... yeah, they do), so the difference is between having a screen with a 2/3 mm bezel above it or having the exact same size and resolution screen with a hole in it. The screen is the same, one of them has a hole in it... so the hole is taking screen away.
And even if that wasn't the case and the screen was getting smaller, the hole is in the middle of your image. A smaller uninterrupted screen is better than an image with a hole in the middle. I don't understand how that is debatable, unless one is, you know, a bit of a moron. Yet here we are.
Now, I will give the notches that at least they poke from the top of the screen, so one could make the argument that the image isn't supposed to go over the line of the notch, and instead that space is for notifications and images should be coded to stay below that line. But of course then you have a WAY bigger "forehead" than any notchless phone would, and that still doesn't hold with the fact that most modern notches and punch holes are very clearly designed for the image to wrap around them in normal media viewing.
I do concede that most morons do not seem to care about the selfie camera, but hey, most morons also do take selfies, which is something I can't really wrap my head around. Then again, if truly nobody cared, then the industry wouldn't have spent a ton of money engineering under-display cameras and all sorts of flip cameras before deciding the compromises weren't worth it.
It's just a thing people have learned to live with on their least important device, like non-replaceable batteries, fixed, overpriced storage and lack of connectivity. The industry decided that was the weirdly enshittified trendy thing and consolidated around it and a lot of people find it annoying, just... not annoying enough to do anything about it. Welcome to the 21st century, I suppose.
Weirdly, you may have sold me on the 1 VII better than the guy telling me it's good. I may need to anchor myself into the sensible choice even at a premium before the enshittification train leads to a single design (two, if you count foldables that turn into a shitty tablet in exchange for being exceedingly frail and expensive).
You make some valid points, but that kind of engineering costs money. Like I said in my other comment, I would genuinely like to see more progress made in that area. The OP7P's pop-up camera was a neat bit of engineering.
Don't conflate that with the actual anti-consumer bullshit, though. A notch/holepunch camera is not the hill to die on when your argument relates to that, it's not even close to the same thing.
It's in a bundle with the other actually useful features like upgradeable storage or wired headphones, in my book.
I agree that I'd like more innovation and variety. Every single phone out there it's just some variation on the exact same thing these days. Ideally you'd have a choice of any combo of those features to fit your preference, but that's just not a thing now.
"Hey guys, check out my new
Black Slab! Its better than the otherBlack Slabbecause ofartificial software limitations!"For what it's worth - that principle is part of why I root my devices. But damn I do miss the neat various hardware features that each brand had.
OnePlus 7 pro. Zenfone 8 Flip.