Smartphone manufacturers continue figuring out a way to avoid the dreaded notch with either under-display cameras and punch hole designs, ZTE has decided to go with the latter and pick on a dual punch hole design for its selfie cameras as revealed by a new patent they recently filed for.
Samsung already features the punch hole design that houses the selfie cameras in their flagship Samsung S10 Plus, S10, and the S10e. ZTE wants to go further with this new layout and add another punch hole. Even though the under-display cameras craze has caught on with OPPO and Xiaomi teasing about them, the new design will take a while before phones hitting the market. The Samsung S10 was slated to launch with this design but instead dropped this design.
The reason this tech is hard to implement is the limitations it faces. We’ve already seen how optical fingerprint sensors work as they use a CMOS camera sensor in the display which doesn’t require a lens to capture your fingerprint. A selfie camera will need one to capture photos and this is why it’s hard.
Sorry, I mean the size of the hole, the hole on the rigid AMOLED.
— ICE UNIVERSE (@UniverseIce) June 4, 2019
Xiaomi’s way is to make a part of the OLED display transparent so that it shows content as a normal display but when the camera is launched, that part becomes transparent to act as a lens.
ZTE probably knows of this and decided to go and perfect an already existing solution with this new patent according to TigerMobiles.
The dual punch hole design will house a regular selfie camera and probably either a wide-angle shooter/dedicated depth sensor or an in-ear speaker. The design also shows a relatively bezel-less form factor and suggests that the smartphone, presumably a mid-range Axon, will also come with an in-display fingerprint sensor.
As usual, patents may or may not lead to actual implementation and the company may entirely skip launching a phone with this new design.
