Smartphones just keep moving closer to an “all display” future. Apple and Samsung have both banished physical buttons from the screens of their flagship phones, but pesky bezels and ugly sensors remain. Now, Xiaomi is showing what our smartphone future could look like with a waterfall display phone concept that contains no buttons or even ports.
Xiaomi is billing its new concept as its first quad-curved waterfall display phone concept, and the design may be representative of what we’ll all be carrying around in a few years’ time. The phone boasts an 88-degree hyper quad-curved glass screen that’s attached to the body via Xiaomi’s 3D bonding process. The result is a display with zero edges, allowing visual content to flow across the screen without limit. To further the idea of a phone that’s “just a screen,” Xiaomi’s designers went for a smooth unibody construction that completely omits buttons and ports. Xiaomi envisions a slew of next-gen technological innovations to replace them, including ultra-thin piezoelectric ceramics, under-display cameras, wireless charging, eSIM chips, pressure-sensitive touch sensors, and display acoustic technology (i.e. the screen is a speaker). Your move, Apple.
