Gadgetory

- Hey guys, this is Austin. All the way back in 2017, Essential introduced the notch. With it, they were able to take the screen and stretch it all the way to the edges, essentially getting rid of the bezel as we know it, unless you count the chin, but well. Then we had the iPhone X, XS and XR, all of which bring the notch to a much, much bigger size. Now from there, pretty much all of last year's full of phones, they are absolutely loaded with notches. You had big notches, small notches, teardrop notches, I mean, they're everywhere. But now we have the savior, the hole-punch display with the Galaxy S10. Here, instead of a notch, they have the front-facing camera surrounded by the rest of the display. However, is this really the future we want? So even though it looks simple on the surface, there's a lot going on to make a hole-punch display work. First of all, you need to be able to cutout the actual display itself, as opposed to a notch, but importantly, it does limit a little bit about what you can fit there. For example, with the Galaxy S10 and the S10+, you can get one or two front-facing cameras, but besides that, things like the fingerprint sensor need to be pushed to below the display and some of the other things like the ambient and the light sensors are actually underneath the screen itself. Now sure, there are definitely other approaches, the Oppo Find X definitely comes to mind as it brings an entirely mechanical operation to the front-facing camera, so you don't have any kind of notch, but when you need the camera, it pops up, however, as cool as this is, I'm not totally convinced the mechanical approaches are really going to make any big difference. The humble notch actually still feels to me like a better solution for most phones. Now the actual looks of the hole-punch display are definitely up to you. Now personally, I do appreciate how small it is, so you don't have any extra space being used, but that being said, a notch at least is symmetrical, well usually on top. The thing with the hole-punch though is that it's always off to the side corner, which means that it can look a little bit odd, specifically in video, where you have essentially a bunch of dead pixels, which can be kind of off to the side. It's certainly not the end of the world and I do think a lot of people will like the look of the hole-punch, but as far as I'm concerned, you are giving up a lot by leaving the notch. For example, take a look at the brand new LG G8, it has a pretty hefty notch and for good reason, they're packing a lot of stuff into that space. In addition to the front-facing camera, they also have a pair of depth sensors, a transmitter, as well as a receiver. This opens up quite a few possibilities. Now first of all, you have much more secure Face ID and I'll get into that in a second, but you also have new technology, which is Hand ID (laughs). It's like the most LG thing ever, Hand ID, no not Face ID, not Fingerprint ID, you still have a fingerprint sensor, instead, what this does is it uses that time-of-flight sensor to actually scan your blood vessels in your hand. All you do is put your hand over the phone, it will scan it for the first time and supposedly, this is an incredibly secure thing, because I mean, you can spoof some things, but you can't spoof an entire hand full of blood vessels. I just find it hilarious that we've come this far, that we've gone from Face ID, had Touch ID, now we've got Vein ID (laughs). Now I mean, to be fair, you do still have the fingerprint sensor, so if you don't wanna use this, you definitely don't have to and it supports Face ID, but the thing is, it's cool to have this stuff with the notch, right? If you don't have the notch, you can't fit all these extra sensors behind the display, or at least, you can't yet. Then there's facial recognition. Now Apple claims this is the reason why they're notch has to be so big and when you look at what all they've crammed inside Face ID, well it kind of makes sense. You've got the front-facing camera, the light and proximity sensors, there's a flood camera as well as a 3D dot projector to get the actual 3D representation of your face, there's also an IR camera to take a look at all of this stuff, specifically at light, or well, in the light, I guess you can use it at any time and on top of that, there's also a front-firing speaker, which doubles as your earpiece. That is a lot of things for the little tiny notch. (cellphone bangs to the floor) That's fine. Now the G8 doesn't have all of this stuff, but you still do have the room for those extra sensors, something that you can't do without a notch. Now one of the cool parts about this is that both of these systems enable much, much more secure facial unlock. Now some phones, including the Essential and including a lot of phones, such as the Galaxy S10, do have an RGB-based sensor, but it's actually a lot easier to fool, since it's essentially just a front-facing camera. When you have all these extra sensors and all these projectors, it does mean that Face ID goes from being something that's kind of cool, but not really all that useful, if you care about security at least, to something that you can use absolutely everyday without worrying. The notch makes it a lot easier to integrate these features and that's something that you really can't do with the hole-punch display, at least not yet. Now we are seeing movement toward getting more and more features underneath the screen. Because the Galaxy S10 already has some sensors, including the fingerprint sensor underneath, I think it's only a matter of time before you don't even need that hole-punch and the camera can be directly underneath. However, for right now, when you go for the hole-punch display, it means that you typically are giving up some of the stuff like the secure face unlock. Now there are advantages to the hole-punch display, namely the fact that it doesn't look quite so ugly as a notch, however, there are definitely trade-offs associated with going with that. So I'm sure we will see a ton more of these hole-punches throughout the year, but as far as I'm concerned, the humble notch doesn't necessarily have an expiration date just yet. (light hip hop music)