Everyone says that the iPhone will have a full-screen display, but do you know how difficult it is to make a truly full-screen phone?

A few days ago, I was flooded with a message on Weibo. This news is not new, and it is even something we talk about almost every year - the iPhone will use a full screen, and it is "official confirmation."

This really shocked me. After all, removing the bangs from the iPhone is something everyone is looking forward to, so I quickly went to the Apple Support Twitter homepage cover picture mentioned in the news to find out the truth.

At first glance, the iPhones of the two ladies in the photo do seem to have screens without bangs, which seems to be a bit like a full-screen iPhone.

But just when I thought that the full-screen iPhone was really coming, I enlarged the picture and saw that in fact both iPhones in the photo had bangs, but the bangs were "hidden" by the reflection and the black background.

If you enlarge the image to 100%, you can see that you can still see the bangs.

The iPhone can achieve a true full-screen display, which is a great thing from an aesthetic point of view. From the user's perspective, a phone with a full screen on the front can bring us a visual impact. However, from a technical point of view, it is not easy to create a true full-screen phone.

Especially on a device like a mobile phone where internal space is already very tight.

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Mobile phone manufacturers can always capture the mentality of consumers, so it’s not that they haven’t tried to make a true full-screen phone. Looking back, manufacturers even went crazy in order to cover the entire front of the phone with a screen.

If it weren’t for the later invention of the hole-punch screen, mobile phones today might be in various forms such as flip-cover and sliding covers.

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Speaking of the originator of full-screen mobile phones, we have to mention the "visual full-screen" mobile phones such as the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge. This group of products will reduce the width of both sides of the screen by bending the screen, visually making the sides of the screen almost without BM black borders and frame design.

We can still see this design on some flagship phones today, and it has also been upgraded to a waterfall screen with a larger curvature, replacing physical interaction with screen interaction.

Last year, there was a revival of slider phones in the mobile phone industry. Xiaomi, Honor, and Lenovo all launched their own slider phones, "simply and crudely" placing the screen on the upper layer, achieving a 93% screen-to-body ratio (the current maximum screen-to-body ratio of mainstream candy-bar phones is 91%).

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There are also mechanical platforms that separate the camera from the screen while maintaining the candy-bar form factor. The previous vivo NEX and OPPO Find were both leaders in mechanical structure. Subsequent dual-screen mobile phones have taken manufacturers' pursuit of screen-to-body ratio to an extreme, with the goal of freeing up more space for the screen on the front of the phone.

From the perspective of form, manufacturers' pursuit of full-screen is crazy, but a deeper analysis shows that behind the various designs are technical compromises. Although manufacturers are moving towards the goal of a true full-screen, they cannot ignore the several openings near the screen - sensors.

In fact, while expanding the screen-to-body ratio, manufacturers have also been trying to hide sensors such as the earpiece and light distance under the screen, trying to minimize the openings on the front of the phone, so the two tasks of expanding the screen and hiding the sensors are carried out simultaneously.

However, the addition of features such as face recognition and gesture recognition has resulted in more and more sensors in mobile phones, which has put the screen-to-body ratio and mobile phone functions in conflict.

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When Google Pixel 4 was first released, some people thought that this phone had a "big forehead", but they ignored the fact that there were 8 sensors above the screen. In addition to the earpiece, camera, light range and other parts, these 8 sensors also have Soli radar for motion detection and dot matrix projector for recognition, which gives Pixel 4 a sensitive motion recognition system.

Even if the radar and infrared sensors are removed, at least three openings are needed above the screen for the earpiece, light distance sensor, and camera.

Of course, mobile phone manufacturers have also moved the sensor to other places, so that the screen has at least three narrow sides without bangs affecting the appearance. The downward movement of the sensors in Xiaomi MIX is a good example. However, this design that subverts the traditional usage logic was eventually replaced by the slider of Xiaomi MIX 3, probably because the slider is more in line with the design requirements of the full screen. Even so, the slider design was finally just a trend among a few manufacturers.

In fact, whether it is a sliding cover or a lifting design, these are just temporary solutions launched by manufacturers to "reduce" the space for sensors. The more complex body structure not only increases the manufacturing cost of the phone, but also occupies the valuable internal space and sealing. Although manufacturers can provide data of hundreds of thousands of openings and closings in their publicity, in fact, everyone's usage habits and scenarios are different, and the mechanical structure is naturally not as sturdy and durable as the traditional straight-plate.

Would you give up waterproofing for a bigger screen?

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Therefore, at present, the mainstream straight-screen mobile phones increase the screen-to-body ratio mainly through three methods: water drop screen, hole-punch screen, and notch screen. The first two are to leave space for the camera lens, hide the sensor under the screen or in the frame to achieve a full-screen design, and even reduce the number of sensors; the notch screen is still the middle way to balance functionality and screen-to-body ratio. The only problem is that it needs to occupy a certain display space.

So in the final analysis, whether a mobile phone can achieve a true full screen is not only a problem for mobile phone manufacturers and screen suppliers, but also whether the sensor technology can achieve accurate under-screen sensing. At present, the under-screen earpiece, light, and infrared sensors based on OLED can be hidden in the screen and the edge seam, but the under-screen camera is still a hurdle that manufacturers have to overcome.

At this month's Future Technology Conference, OPPO exhibited its first prototype with an under-screen camera design. With the help of the screen's densely pixelated small hole perspective principle, the camera can shoot through the OLED screen.

However, "taking photos under the screen" is not something that can be solved by simply launching a set of patents. From the sample photos released by OPPO, it can be seen that the original photos of the under-screen camera are average in color and clarity compared to ordinary front-facing photos, and need to be optimized in post-production to achieve the performance of an ordinary front-facing camera.

This actually tests the manufacturer's ability to adjust the camera hardware and camera system. In addition, CMOS components specially designed for under-screen shooting may also be required.

Of course, in addition to OPPO, Xiaomi, vivo, and Huawei also have patents for under-screen cameras, which are generally achieved by customizing the screen material and the light-transmitting properties of the material. So we can see that full-screen design and under-screen shooting will inevitably be the future development direction of mobile phones, but under the current technical conditions, these concepts still have many technical difficulties that mobile phone manufacturers need to work together with screen and camera suppliers to overcome. If you want to put a "true full-screen" mobile phone on the market, it will take at least 1-2 years from research and development to investment.

Therefore, what we are talking about now as "full-screen iPhone" is actually more like a self-entertainment, not to mention the "real hammer" from the official.