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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

Now that we have gorgeous displays, I'd like to see manufacturers compete over a new metric: Smallest Total Bezel Area.

The bezels on all phones today are just too damn big. The top bezel should not be taller than ~6mm (enough for speaker, camera and sensors) and the bottom should not be more than 4mm (enough to round the phone) and the side bezels should basically not exist at all.

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Still may not be up to your liking, but according to this screen vs. body chart, the Note is the current winner in lowest bezel%, followed by S3.

http://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-screen-to-body-size-...

That would affect the user experience of the device. How would you hold the device? How would you play games?

HTC Sensation is an whole-screen device, but the user experience is really bad. I prefer iPhone 4/4S design any other day.

The bevel could be virtual - painted on by the OS or application but not accepting touch inputs. Perhaps even custom to the user preferences. It could go away for certain uses cases, like full screen video. It could even have function buttons rendered on it that are context dependent.

Sure, this might work. But the extra pixels needed for the bezel will consume battery with current technology. Also, a new kind of proximity sensor have to be developed for these use cases. It will be really annoying to set the virtual bezel manually all the time.

Not on AMOLED. Remember that AMOLED does not use any power to display blacks.

Photographs and magazines are full-bleed, but we don't mind it. As long as the device is smart about ignoring perimeter touches, I wouldn't be surprised if in the future our phones are full bleed with speakers and cameras hidden behind the display.

There is a concern about unwanted touches being registered if the bezel is too small, but the interface and screen controller could probably be adapted to minimize this.

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