It’s almost the end of the year, and that means there’s still time for a new phone, with Huawei’s latest showing off a hole punch screen ahead of the new year.
Aside for cameras, one of the big trends in smartphones this year was big screens. Not just a bigger display, but a focus on removing the bezels and frame, as full-view became all-screen near the end of the year, and manufacturers did what they could to remove the edges, helping to give off the impression that you held a piece of the future in your hands.
Just like that, the images on your phone bleed into your hands, as phone makers tried all sorts of tricks to make the big screen seem so much bigger when the bezels disappeared. We’ve seen curves added and borders removed, with cameras hidden in some, as manufacturers start to embrace a design focused on obscuring elements like the camera so that the screen can feel bigger.
And as we head into the new year, we’re already getting a feeling as to how the all-screen phone will look next year, an all-screen view on the front, save for a hole punched out of thre corner.
That’s something Samsung treated us to barely a week ago, announcing the A8s, a mid-range phone that delivered one of the first examples of that hole-punch screen design, with the front camera found under that section.
Not even a week later, Huawei is ready with one of its own, as it announces the Nova 4, the next generation of its Nova mid-range smartphone handsets.
The new Nova takes on the look of its Nova 3i and Nova 3e siblings we saw earlier in the year, at least from the back, while the front is pretty much all screen, and it’s all screen with a difference even to Huawei’s other “all-screen” gadgets.
While the Nova 3e and 3i both included bezels at the top and bottom, the Nova 4 ditches the bezels everywhere but the bottom, and includes that new hole punch design in the top left corner on the front, providing a front-facing camera in that position, but leaving that all-screen design on the front pretty much in tact.
The front-facing camera is a 25 megapixel camera, and it is matched with three cameras on the back, offering 48 megapixel F1.8 main camera, a 16 megapixel super-wise F2.2 camera, and a 2 megapixel F2.4 depth of field camera for portrait images.
Most of the phone comes off feeling pretty new, with Bluetooth, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WiFi, and Type C USB, too, as well as a fingerprint sensor and the same chip out of Huawei’s P20 Pro, the Kirin 970, which is paired with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage.
There’s also a 6.4 inch LCD here running the resolution of 2310×1080, and a few colours, too.
As for whether Australia will see the new phone, the Huawei Nova 4, Huawei’s local arm hasn’t yet made a comment, though the smart money is on this Nova being made available locally.
We’ll let you know as and when that happens, though we’d guess February next year as the starting point for that, especially as we draw closer to Mobile World Congress in late February of next year.
