Vivo Might Launch A Smartphone With ... Four Punch-Holes On The Screen

Recently, Vivo has submitted a new patent revealing a quite "weird" design that might appear on Vivo’s future smartphones.

Specifically, a new patent registered by the Chinese company to the Chinese Intellectual Property Office shows a smartphone screen design with four punch-holes. According to what is described in the present patent, these four cut-outs can be designed in four different corners or in the upper 2 corners with 2 cut-outs on each side.

In these cut-outs, Vivo will likely be placed sensors and selfie cameras. However, we can’t confirm how many sensors and cameras will be placed in those punch-holes.

At the moment, all three designs are just sketches in a patent. It is not clear which design Vivo will use the future or the company might even get rid of all of these designs. Last year, Vivo was the first company to bring a pop-up selfie camera design to the Vivo NEX 2018 and the design has appeared on so many different lineups so far. However, at the end of this year, manufacturers have started to abandon the pop-up design and switched to the punch-hole display. For example, the new Redmi K30 and Oppo Reno 3, both of which launched recently, come with a punch-hole display replacing the pop-up camera design on their predecessors.

In 2020, it is likely that the punch-hole screen trend will become more popular, besides the development of under-display selfie camera. At the recent Inno Day event in China, OPPO demonstrated a smartphone with a selfie camera hidden under the screen. However, at the present time, this technology still has certain limitations. Therefore, smartphone makers might still settle with the hole-punch design on its upcoming smartphones, for example, Samsung with the Galaxy S11 ( Galaxy S20) or Realme with the Realme X50 5G.

In the meantime, Vivo India is preparing to launch the global version of the Vivo S1 Pro in India on 4 January, but it hasn't revealed the Vivo S1 Pro price in India yet.