 As the performance improvements in each new generation of smartphones have dwindled, engineering and marketing departments alike have looked for new ways to quantify just how great their latest gadgets really are. Now before we had the races for more megapixels, thinner chassis, and ever greater pixel density displays, with all of these eventually reaching the point where they actually caused as many problems as they solved. And lately it's been all about screen to body ratio and boy has this one ever resulted in some ugly ducklings. Thankfully, it's almost over and I'm gonna tell you why. With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code Linus to get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. So the current goal for pretty much every modern smartphone manufacturer seems to be to build a phone with bezels so thin that they're effectively not even there. I'm sure some of you are already drooling at the thought of an all-screen phone, but others might say, well, it's kind of stupid. Aren't bezels small enough as it is? And those people have a point. For some of the folks out there, bezels have already gotten so small that they can make it more difficult to use the phone. Like if you're reaching across with your thumb while typing one-handed. The thing is that you need a little bit of bezel in order to hold onto your device, and there's got to be a little bit of non-sensitive part there because skin is not hard. It's soft and it kind of moshes onto it. Now, this is something that's less likely to come up in portrait mode, but I've actually noticed that it can be uncomfortable to hold a phone with tiny or no bezels while watching videos or playing games. Your mileage may vary though. But in spite of these practical concerns, there is certainly some sex appeal, if nothing else, to an all-screen device. So let's take a look in today's video at the various approaches that manufacturers are taking to get as close as possible. Now the first thing that probably came to your mind is everybody's favorite, the notch. It seems like everyone loves to crucify Apple for inventing this, and you wouldn't be unfair to say that they definitely helped to popularize the design, but Apple wasn't the first company to utilize a notch. That particular crown of thorns lies upon the head of LG. Their V10 launched back in 2015 had a massive notch in the corner for the front cameras. Now they kind of put some spackle on this with a second display that was used exclusively for shortcuts, stats, or notifications. So people really didn't see it as taking away from the main display, hence the lack of outrage. The first screen to actually make use of an in-screen notch was the Sharp S2 as a way to showcase their freeform display technology. Freeform works by moving the displays driving electronics away from the edges and into the screen itself, allowing a display to be made into virtually any shape. A couple days later there was the slightly more popular essential phone, and then finally of course the iPhone X. So why does the notch need to be there? Well, if you extend the display all the way to the bottom of the phone removing the chin bar, all you need to relocate is the home button which can be easily moved around to the back or the side or done through software without any real compromise to usability. However, when you go to extend the display upward to remove the forehead you encounter a bit of a dilemma. The front-facing camera and sensors can't really be moved without sacrificing some pretty serious functionality, hence the notch. The next attempts to make an all-screen display were kind of a throwback to the sliding phones of the early 2000s. Now, there is some variety in the approaches around this concept, but they mostly fall into two types. Either some portion of the back of the phone slides up exposing the selfie camera and or the sensors like on the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3, or the camera pops out on a little nubbin like on the Vivo Nex. Now at first glance, this kind of seems like a no-brainer. The perfect solution that just took a little bit of backwards thinking. But sadly, there are a number of downsides to either design with the biggest one being structural integrity. Going from no moving pieces to, well, any moving pieces will have some impact on the phone's durability, especially if your slider is motorized like on the Oppo Find X. And you're gonna be kind of screwed if the internal motors just stop working, especially on this one because they also got rid of the fingerprint sensor like Apple. And that's before we can even get to the other downsides, like how would you make a case for this device? And if you could, well, how is that slider going to affect its susceptibility to water damage or dust ingress? Now, technically there is still time to see how these devices hold up, but in my book, honestly, they're just kind of a dead meme at this point. I mean, they're cool, but... Which brings us next to a solution that'd be obvious to anyone who thinks that people posing for selfies are a bunch of narcissistic douchebogs. Douchebogs? I like that, douchebogs. What if we just removed the selfie cam? Then who cares? The problem with that is that, well, then you wouldn't be able to take selfies anymore. But fear not, Vivo's solution to this is what actually inspired us to make this video. The Vivo Nex Dual Display is a truly fascinating device. As the name implies, it actually has two displays. One right here on the front, and another one on the back. So the idea is that when you want to take a selfie, you can just flip around the phone and use the rear display to see what the crap it is that you're doing. Now, it is a little bit less convenient, but I gotta say, using your full fat rear camera to take your selfies is going to seriously help you step up your Instagram game. And what's cool is that the second screen also provides some extra functionality, like showing you the framing of the shot if you ask someone else to take a photo for you. So you can avoid that whole, like, hey, can you take a picture for me? And then they take the picture and you, like, look at it and you kind of wait till they leave, and then you ask someone else because they're just completely incompetent. It also allows you to quickly flip to the other side of the phone to attend to random social media stuff while gaming and some other things as well. It's kind of cool. But the current implementation is still a little bit clunky. Not to mention that on this particular phone, there's this massive weird camera bump that doubles as a notification LED ring. I don't know. I think a regular LED on the back probably would have sufficed, so hopefully the next version goes with that instead. With all that said, out of everything that's available right now, the dual-screen approach to making an all-screen device is my personal favorite. Even if there's still some work to do on the software side of things, I've already seen a rear screen used in other novel ways, like on the Nubia X, which handled switching screens really quickly while I was playing with it at CES and used that rear screen to provide extra rear buttons for gaming. The issue, though, is that every one of these solutions seems to make at least one compromise, whether that's a less intuitive experience, making the phone an eyesore, compromising durability, or adding thickness and or reducing battery life because the bloody thing has two screens. So back to that ultimate goal of a whole-screen phone, the only perfect answer seems to be an under-screen camera, but this time it looks like we're gonna have to wait a while for that. Now we did visit LG Displays Factory in Korea quite recently, and they were extremely proud of their approximately 50% transparency OLED displays. But given that issues exist with selfie camera image quality already, cutting the light transmission in half probably isn't gonna be a good time. But progress is happening, and under-screen fingerprint scanners like the one in the OnePlus 6T and in the Vivo Nex dual-screen here actually are very similar technologically to camera sensors, just with quality standards that aren't as high as you'd expect when you're trying to snap a selfie in the club or whatever. So I'm still pretty hopeful. But let us know in the comments down below. First, would you have preferred that we had gone with our original plan of just doing a normal review of this phone, or did you enjoy us using it as a prop to take a broader look at current all-screen display technology? And second, what do you think is the best solution currently on the market? FreshBooks is the small business accounting software that's custom-built for how you want to work. It's a simple way to be more productive, more organized, and to get paid faster if you're a freelancer or if you're self-employed. You can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds. You can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to four days faster. You can see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to the guessing games. And this is really cool. You can take the whole experience with you on the go with their fully featured apps for both Android and iOS. So don't take my word for it. Try out FreshBooks today. 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