Bad iPhone notches are happening to good Android phones

I’ve been coming to Mobile World Congress for close to a decade now, and I’ve never seen the iPhone copied quite so blatantly and cynically as I witnessed during this year’s show. MWC 2018 will go down in history as the launch platform for a mass of iPhone X notch copycats, each of them more hastily and sloppily assembled than the next.

No effort is being made to emulate the complex Face ID system that resides inside Apple’s notch; companies like Noa and Ulefone are in such a hurry to get their iPhone lookalike on the market that they haven’t even customized their software to account for the new shape of the screen. More than one of these notched handsets at MWC had the clock occluded by the curved corner of the display.

I have an iPhone X, and the notch doesn’t bother me at all. Face ID works reasonably well – not as good as Touch ID, but good enough – and thus, gives the notch a reason to exist in the first place. I don’t feel particularly strongly towards either Samsung’s small chin/forehead solution, or Essential’s/Apple’s notch solution, and I’m glad it at least creates some visual difference between phones. However, if you decide to go with a notch, don’t just copy Apple’s shape while not actually putting anything underneath it.

I can’t believe this is truly going to be a thing.

16 Comments

  1. 2018-03-06 2:50 am
    • 2018-03-06 8:54 am
  2. 2018-03-06 9:29 am
    • 2018-03-06 4:27 pm
      • 2018-03-06 6:14 pm
        • 2018-03-07 12:14 am
    • 2018-03-07 1:23 pm
      • 2018-03-09 12:05 am
  3. 2018-03-06 10:39 am
  4. 2018-03-06 10:54 am
    • 2018-03-07 5:22 am
  5. 2018-03-06 11:08 am
  6. 2018-03-06 12:51 pm
  7. 2018-03-07 8:16 am
  8. 2018-03-09 12:42 am
  9. 2018-03-09 8:07 am