One dominant design that can be found in today's competing smartphone brands is the shrinking of the bezels. This is done to make way for larger displays without having to increase the bulk of the device. Japanese electronics manufacturer Sharp recently announced the Aquos S2, a phone that takes the minimal bezel design and pushes it to another level.
Announced on Tuesday, the new phone features a 5.5-inch, 2K resolution screen that wraps around the front-facing camera, making the top portion of the device, along with the sides, almost bezel-less. The design is reminiscent of the Essential phone, the upcoming flagship phone created by Android founder Andy Rubin, although that phone is not yet in the market.
While the design idea is elegant, a small detail makes the phone look a bit strange. It has cut-off angled corners on the top, instead of the usual rounded corners of other manufacturers.
At the back of the Aquos S2 sits a dual camera that is situated vertically on the top left portion, with the flash found right below it. The design looks a lot like the rumored camera design of the upcoming iPhone 8.
The Aquos S2 comes in two versions. The "Standard Edition" features a Snapdragon 630 processor, 4 GB of random access memory (RAM), and 64 GB of storage. On the other hand, the "High Edition" has a Snapdragon 660 chip, 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage space. Both models will sport a decent 3,020 mAh capacity battery, a fingerprint sensor and the Android Nougat operating system.
This is not the first time that Sharp has released a smartphone with an almost bezel-less design. Years before smart phone giants Samsung, LG, and China's Xiaomi followed the design trend, Sharp had already developed and released a bezel-less smartphone which was the Aquos Crystal in 2014. It featured a display that stretched to the top edge of the device, relocating the front camera sensor to the bottom portion of the device.
