Looks like Essential has a patent for a no-notch screen with a pop-up camera

If you’ve been following the news from MWC 2018, you’ve probably heard of the Vivo Apex, an almost bezel-less concept phone with a pop-up front camera. It seems they aren’t the first ones to think of the idea. A Twitter exchange between an Essential fan named Rafael and Essential CEO Andy Rubin shows off that the company has a patent for the technology. Rafael sent over a Gizmodo article about the Apex and Rubin responded with a link to a Google Patents page that showed Essential filing a US patent back in May 2016 entitled "Apparatus and method to maximize the display area of a mobile device." A follow-up patent is currently pending.

It shows basically the exact thing Vivo showed off and the patent was granted in August 2017. Another implementation shown has the camera placed on the top-left corner of the screen and acts as a permanent camera icon. But, of course, we must remember that even if a patent has been filed it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll come to a device soon. But if Rubin was willing to talk about it, perhaps our odds of seeing one in the future might be more likely than we think.

Source: Android Police

Vivo pushes boundaries again with Apex concept phone

Vivo made a pretty big splash at CES early last month with its work with Synaptics by putting the fingerprint reader on the phone’s OLED display. The Chinese company looks to steal the spotlight yet again at Mobile World Congress with the new concept phone it’s showing off. Called the Apex, this nearly bezel-less phone has what Vivo is describing as a “half-screen in-display fingerprint scanning technology.” However, as The Verge points out, it’s more like taking up a third of the screen, which still isn’t bad idea. For extra security, sometimes you can enable the input of two different fingerprints to have it unlock the screen.

But what happens to the other key sensors you find out the phone? Vivo’s decided to make this come out at the top of the device like a periscope or pop-up flash when you turn the selfie camera on. A pretty nifty move. It takes less than a second for it to get ready for use. As for the earpiece speaker, Vivo’s approach is to make the entire screen vibrate itself like a speaker so you can hear calls even without completely holding the device close to your ear. Vivo says it doesn’t have plans to release an actual device based on this form but it does show us the possibility of this happening and almost completely bezel-less phones being in our near future.