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Where do Ava Fabian Archiveswe go next, now that the notch has become nearly ubiquitous on smartphone screens?

According to a new report, the next step in maximizing the real estate on smartphone screens might be a simple hole.

Korean outlet ETNews (via Android Authority) wrote Thursday that Chinese phone maker Huawei might launch a phone with a hole that houses the selfie camera on top of the screen.

The details on the phone are scarce, but it would reportedly have a 6.39-inch LCD screen, a tiny, round hole near the top of the screen to house the selfie cam, and a very thin bezel on the very top to house the speaker and sensors.

The result, in the schematics provided by ETNews, actually looks a lot like the Essential Phone, which technically has a notch but it's just as big to wrap around the selfie camera. The same image also shows an under-the-display fingerprint sensor, but the report doesn't mention that feature in the context of a Huawei phone.

The benefits from this design seem quite small compared to simply having a notch, but hey, if it saves a few more pixels, we're not (necessarily) against it.

The report mentions the last quarter of 2018 as a likely launch date for this device, and Huawei's Mate series is typically launched near the end of the year, so if we had to guess which Huawei phone will be getting the holy non-notch, the Mate would be it.

Other phone designs that try to do away with the notch include Oppo and Vivo's pop-up camera (see below). This (combined with a couple of other technologies) has the benefit of completely removing the notch, but comes with a couple of drawbacks, including the possibility of the camera pop-up mechanism getting broken.

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In other Huawei news, the company's mobile chief Richard Yu Chengdong said Wednesday that Huawei might ship 200 million phone units by the end of the year, possibly overtaking Apple as the second largest phone vendor, South China Morning Post reported Thursday.

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