How Touchscreen Smartphones Have Evolved
‘Smartphones’
The pace of advancements made in the touchscreen smartphone industry over the years has been mind-boggling. The smartphone space has become one of the most hotly contested ones with hundreds of companies vying for a piece of the market share. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the smartphone industry has been the fastest evolving one in the tech landscape. In just a few years, we’ve gone from smartphones that were slow and clunky to phones of today that are absolute powerhouses.
It’s easy to take many of the things that our smartphones can do today for granted. For many people, smartphones have almost replaced personal desktop PCs and even laptops. Smartphones have become multipurpose devices capable of doing hundreds of tasks. Smartphones have almost become our assistants, with AI enabling us to ask for things like best assignment writing service UK simply.
Today, smartphones are well and truly an integral part of our lives. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at how the most important element of touchscreen smartphones, the screen, has evolved.
Screen
What’s one of the most important parts of a touchscreen smartphone? Well, as is evident from the name, it’s the screen. Today, the smartphone screens are truly a marvel. They are big, bright, colourful and beautiful. Colours pop off these screens, seemingly jumping out from the phone. In fact, it can be argued that smartphone screens today are miles ahead of the TVs’ that the general population has in their houses. We’ve gone from screens with measly resolutions to screens that pack a mind-boggling number of pixels in such a small form-factor.
Today, smartphone screens primarily consist of two types: LCD and AMOLED. To keep it short, LCD generally provides more true to life colours, while AMOLED provides more saturated colours and deeper blacks. AMOLED is a technology that was invented by Samsung and is now seeing wider adoption. AMOLED screens have several advantages over LCD, being more battery friendly and generally more pleasing to look at. In an AMOLED screen, the extra layers required in LCD are removed, giving that look of icons being on the surface rather than under the glass.
Then there’s the state of bezels. Bezels are the physical body surrounding the screen on a smartphone. The smartphones of old used to have huge bezels around the screens, which made them look ugly, not to mention it increased the size of the phone itself. Over the years, the race towards smaller bezels picked up steam, reducing bezels with each passing year. The ultimate goal of reducing bezels has always been to achieve an all-screen smartphone, a phone that has no physical body lines or space around the screen. As with every other innovation, we seem to be almost at that point where we’ve got phones that are purely screen on the front.
The journey to achieving an all-screen smartphone has been an interesting one. First, there were slimmer bezels, then came notches, which got reduced further. We then say front cameras being relocated in clever ways by manufacturers. These included pop-up cameras, cameras that slide up from the top of the phones. We also saw sliding phones, phones that slid the screen down to reveal front cameras. Then came hole-punch screens, screens that have a camera embedded in them on a cut-out. Safe to say, we’ve almost reached that point of having a phone that’s all-screen at the front. It won’t be too long before we see a smartphone launch with a screen which has a camera that’s underneath the display, removing the need to have workarounds.