I think we can all agree that smartphone innovation in the high end has plateaued. All flagship phones are glass and metal slabs with big beautiful displays, powerful processors and great cameras. Over the past few years, the most notable trends have been the push towards bezel-less screens and multiple cameras at the back.
Now in their quest to push screens to the edges, manufactures have had to shift the hardware in the front. This meant placing the fingerprint scanner under the display. Some have even tried to replace the front speaker with vibrating displays. But the one thing that has remained elusive is the selfie camera. And this has led to the birth of notch, hole-punch and pop-up selfie camera.
While quite a few preferred the pop-up selfie camera, manufacturers ditched it because it had too many moving parts and made water-proofing very difficult. So, today most smartphones use the hole-punch. But however small the hole-punch might get, some will always hate it for interrupting their gorgeous displays.
So, the next big innovation in smartphones is moving the camera under the display. Now companies like Xiaomi and Oppo have already demonstrated this technology, but no one has been able to bring it to market yet. And it looks like ZTE might be the first one to do so with their Axon A20 5G. In a Weibo post, the company’s president had revealed that they would be the first to bring the technology to the market.
And now a ZTE smartphone with model number A2121 has been spotted on TENNA, the Chinese certification website. It has a 6.92-inch OLED display with a resolution of 2460 x 1080. Under the hood, it will have a 2.4GHz Snapdragon 765G processor. The phone will come with 6/8/12GB of RAM and 64/128/256GB of storage. It will also include a micro-SD card slot. On the back, it will have a quad-camera setup with a 64MP+8MP+2MP+2MP setup. Powering all of this will be a 4120mAh battery.
The front selfie camera is 32MP. Sadly, we cannot make out through the images if the camera is under-the-display or not. But we won’t have to wait too long to find out, since the phone is going to launch in China.
