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How much of your phone is actually screen?

Red Storm

Red Storm

Lifer
There are many reasons why I have a G2 and had a Note 3, and this is one of them. Big bezels are ugly!

screen-infographic.png
 
Hmm for some reason I would have expected the Moto X to be higher in the list - it seems to be quite compact for the screen size.

I'm with you as well regarding bezels - I don't think we're at the point yet where they're too small (as a current Note 3 user). It's one of the reasons I couldn't get onboard with the HTC One and Xperia Z1.
 
Interesting that the Lumia 1520/1320 rank so high with capacitive buttons. Looks like WP8.1 will fully support on screen buttons, will make for some interesting new hardware there.
 
I assume the chart includes onscreen buttons as part of screen size, which is probably fair as some apps will indeed claim those pixels back for use.

notposting said:
Interesting that the Lumia 1520/1320 rank so high with capacitive buttons. Looks like WP8.1 will fully support on screen buttons, will make for some interesting new hardware there.
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True of the Note 3 & S4 too though. Capacitive buttons don't need to grow with device/screen size, so keeping them constant while growing the phone will result in them taking up relatively less of the device face.
 
Hmm for some reason I would have expected the Moto X to be higher in the list - it seems to be quite compact for the screen size.
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it's pretty much only significantly beaten by the G2 and Note 3. I'd speculate it's harder to give small phones a small bezel percentage, hence why the Moto X looks so impressive.

IMO for non-rooted phones the Note 3 is the real winner here, because its screen is not cluttered by a navigation bar. I'm in favor of on-screen buttons when they shrink bezels by removing the need for capacitive or physical ones, but samsung gets impressively far without needing to resort to that.

For rooted phones they're not a big issue, since you can shrink them down to 30 pixels or auto-hide them. It's really time they start offering these as standard features in smartphone software.
 
In general this metric seems like it should favor large phones. Bezels don't scale proportionally. Even if Apple did minimize bezels more, they'd still be at a disadvantage.

At the same time I think that phones w/o capacitive keys should account for a virtual bezel created by the soft keys. Before you mention immersive mode, I'd like to say that it doesn't apply in every case.
 
DLeRium said:
At the same time I think that phones w/o capacitive keys should account for a virtual bezel created by the soft keys. Before you mention immersive mode, I'd like to say that it doesn't apply in every case.
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It can if you want. My G2 has hidden nav buttons that only appear when I swipe up. It took a quick root to get that functionality, but the option is there and it doesn't require flashing a custom ROM thankfully.

As for the smaller phones being at a disadvantage... well, I guess that's just one of the disadvantages to using a smaller phone. Any time I try to use my wife's smaller phone I am constantly reminded of the diminutive size and how cramped and annoying it is to use compared to my G2.
 
DLeRium said:
In general this metric seems like it should favor large phones. Bezels don't scale proportionally. Even if Apple did minimize bezels more, they'd still be at a disadvantage.
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Possibly, but I notice by that chart that the original Galaxy Note is in about the same category as phones far smaller than it.

Even the Note 2 is surprisingly low-ranked compared to its size.

Also the MotoX, Nexus 5 and GS4 score very high without being phablets.

IMO with Apple, the top and bottom bezels are way behind the times, even for the size of their screens.

Large bezels to me are not only ugly- they're largely useless. It's just carrying around that much more phone that isn't screen.
 
Only 64.8% and that's primarily because of the awesome stereo speakers (that I ended up never use anyway). Oh well, it's still pretty 😀
 
cronos said:
Only 64.8% and that's primarily because of the awesome stereo speakers (that I ended up never use anyway). Oh well, it's still pretty 😀
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Really all they need to do is have the two front speakers and an edge to edge display in between. Would be the best looking phone ever. The fat bezels that sat between the speakers and screen kinda ruined the One's look for me.
 
Zaap said:
Possibly, but I notice by that chart that the original Galaxy Note is in about the same category as phones far smaller than it.

Even the Note 2 is surprisingly low-ranked compared to its size.

Also the MotoX, Nexus 5 and GS4 score very high without being phablets.

IMO with Apple, the top and bottom bezels are way behind the times, even for the size of their screens.

Large bezels to me are not only ugly- they're largely useless. It's just carrying around that much more phone that isn't screen.
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There are exceptions sure, but just thinking about it already makes sense. Larger phones don't necessarily result in a scaled bezel. Even if the iPhone had the same bezels as a Moto X, it would lose because this metric favors larger phones.

Furthermore, if you add on the virtual bezel created by soft keys on the GNex, it plummets 7.5% to 59.5%. That phone was ridiculous considering Google advertised it as having small bezels during the keynote.
 
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However you want to look at it.

Fact is, with every new model, Samsung has improved the Galaxy S line screen/bezel ratio to move up an entire row on the chart. The size of the phones hasn't drastically changed, in fact, I think they might even have managed to increase the screen size on the S4 while making the phone slightly smaller. (They definitely did that with some dimensions from Note 2 to Note 3.

Apple could do much better also, they just don't ever have to.
 
kaerflog said:
Except Sony's design lately are mostly big fat bezels.
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Fair enough. I should rephrase: I like ONE of Sony's designs I've seen lately, namely the Xperia ZL. Otherwise I'm not really up on anything Sony makes, and a safe bet I'll never own a Sony phone.
 
Zaap said:
However you want to look at it.

Fact is, with every new model, Samsung has improved the Galaxy S line screen/bezel ratio to move up an entire row on the chart. The size of the phones hasn't drastically changed, in fact, I think they might even have managed to increase the screen size on the S4 while making the phone slightly smaller. (They definitely did that with some dimensions from Note 2 to Note 3.

Apple could do much better also, they just don't ever have to.
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Yeah, they've managed to improve that ratio while slowing the phone down with so much bloat.

Do. Not. Want.
 
Dari said:
Yeah, they've managed to improve that ratio while slowing the phone down with so much bloat.

Do. Not. Want.
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Riiiight, because we all buy that a Galaxy S is faster than an S2 is faster than an S3 is faster than an S4.
 
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