Samsung Developing New Infinity Displays That Feature Notches

The highlight of the Samsung Developer Conference yesterday was the company’s foldable smartphone concept with the new Infinity Flex display. Interestingly, Samsung also revealed that it is developing new types of Infinity Displays that will eliminate bezels, but will also feature notches.

Samsung director of product marketing Hassan Anjum showed off onstage four types of Infinity Displays that are currently in development and three of them have a notch. Samsung is one of the few smartphone manufacturers that have avoided putting a notch on their smartphones, but now it looks like the company may have decided that it may be necessary to achieve a true bezel-less design. The new display technologies have been given the names Infinity U, Infinity V, Infinity O and New Infinity.

The Infinity U appears to have a regular notch that’s already found on a lot of other smartphones these days. The notch appears to look very similar to the one that’s found on the Essential Phone. The “U” shaped cutout is located at the top center of the display. The Infinity V, on the other hand, looks almost the same. However, its notch comes with hard edges, as pointed out by Android Authority.

The Infinity O probably has the most unusual looking type of notch. The display comes with a circular cutout that’s located near the edge. The design also gives handsets more of a true bezel-less look, but the notch will still cover some screen real estate. The Infinity O's cutout is also a bit reminiscent of the unusual notch that’s on the Asus ZenFone 6 prototype that was leaked last month.

The last Infinity Display that’s in development is just called New Infinity and it looks like it has no notch in sight. It offers a real edge-to-edge screen. Samsung didn’t provide additional information on the New Infinity concept, but it’s already being speculated that this may be the same type of display technology that the company showed off last month in China during its OLED forum conference.

The display technology that Samsung showed at the time depicts the smartphone having most of its sensors embedded underneath the display itself. These include the fingerprint sensor, haptics, sound and an under panel sensor, which is believed to be the front-facing camera. This type of technology might not be ready yet and it might take some time before it’s ever applied to one of Samsung’s phones, as pointed out by The Verge.

Samsung didn’t say when these new Infinity Display concepts will be applied to its smartphones, but the presentation may be a sign that the company is preparing to embrace the notch like Apple and all other Android manufacturers. It’s being speculated that Samsung might start putting notches on its phones as early as 2019. With that in mind, it’s very possible that the Galaxy S10 might be the first Samsung phone to come with a notch.