This Phone Has Two Notches, But It’s Not Due To Any Bugs

If you’ve missed some latest smartphone news, 2018 is the year of the notch. The race of notch has gone from big notches to small ones, waterdrop notches and hole notches. And to continue, a phone maker has thought of going for two notches.

The phone we’re talking about the Aquos R2 Compact from Sharp, an electronics firm. You may know Sharp for making other electronic devices such as televisions, but not phones.

If you consider its hardware, the Aquos R2 Compact is, in fact, not so bad. The phone features the Snapdragon 845 chip from Qualcomm, with a frequency at 2.8GHz and the Andreno 630 CPU. It offers 4GB of RAM, an Internal storage of 64GB with microSD card support up to 512GB). Plus, its IGZO screen is 5.2 inches, which is a new 120Hz display just like in the Razer Phone 2. The phone also comes with a single rear 8MP rear camera and a 22MP selfie camera. The Aquos R2 Compact is packed with a 2,500mAh battery and runs on Android Pie 9.0.

However, what to note here is that the phone has two notches instead of one. But unlike the bug in Google Pixel 3, these are real notches, one at the phone’s top and the other at the bottom. Lying on the top is a waterdrop, yet it looks more like that on the Essential Phone than other recent phones’ notches.

Meanwhile, the other notch moulds itself around half of the home button that doubles as the fingerprint reader. The bottom notch also supports gesture navigation with various actions when you swipe the sensor in different directions.

Luckily, Android now supports extra notches. The second notch let Sharp not only add a fingerprint scanner on the front but also keep the handset small and manageable on one hand. The phone seems not to cause any trouble for users, but it may not be for everyone.

Unluckily, we may never see this phone in person as Sharp has the tradition to limit its phone sales to Japan, this two-notch phone may be no different. The handset will be on sale from mid-January.