ZTE doubles down on the notch, believing two are better than one

A newly discovered patent filing from ZTE shows that the company has been potentially working on a phone with two notches, one on the top and a second disgracing the bottom. The filing is from September 2017, so it was right around the time of the iPhone X reveal.

There's a ZTE concept, known as the Iceberg, floating around that shows a similar dual-notch smartphone. The patent filing, however, differs slightly. For starters, the bottom notch on the patent filing makes room for a fingerprint scanner, unlike the Iceberg that apparently has a speaker in the notch. The top notch on the patent filing is also much smaller, similar to the Essential Phone.

I'm definitely not a fan of notches, especially when companies seem to simply copy Apple without an actual purpose. The ZTE bottom notch does allow the screen to wrap around a home button, creating more real estate, but the recent in-screen fingerprint scanner makes it look comical.

The construction of the Iceberg concept supposedly uses a new manufacturing method that fuses two pieces of glass to create seamless unibody. It sounds very cool, but how on earth could you repair a solid body of glass? Like many recent smartphones, the screen's corners are curved, but the transparent glass remains square, creating a unique look.

The ZTE Iceberg is probably far from a realistic production run. First of all, ZTE is facing even more trouble than Huawei. The company could possibly be banned from using Android on future phones, Make Huawei's ban from US carrier shelves seem like a slap on the wrist. The potential ban is a result of ZTE lying to the US in regard to technology it sold to Iran. So no US technology could be sold or supplied to ZTE, which includes Android OS.

I hope that the bottom notch is simply replaced with an in-screen fingerprint scanner. One notch is bad enough, but two? Given ZTE's recent troubles, the phone might never see the light of day. So for now, we'll have to just live with one notch on smartphones.

Source: Android Authority