Removing bezels from TVs, phones and tablets can cause rather than solve problems in tech
Back in 2014, I wrote for Stuff about the tech industry’s obsession with thin. The point was that a fixation on making products thinner was becoming detrimental to the user experience, given that a few extra mm could house larger batteries, or superior keyboards. Now, the tech industry seems to have its eyes set on eradicating bezels, as outlined in Pocket-lint’s piece on new Samsung tellies.
Samsung’s not alone. In phones, removing the bezel now appears to be some kind of holy grail, and, frankly, this baffles me. Sure, I don’t want a massive chunky bezel that makes a device seem like it’s rocked up from a 1985 concept video. But most of the time, I want a bezel in a screen-based device. A frame around content provides focus. And with a tablet, it provides somewhere for your thumbs to go, rather than them covering what you’re looking at and interacting with.
It’s also notable that in the Android space, attempts to remove the bezel have resulted in some horribly ugly creations. Companies triumphantly boast about stripping the bezel back, but on devices that retain a ‘chin’, thereby resulting in something that looks visually imbalanced. At that point, the breathless rush to remove the bezel has not only impacted on user experience, but also visual design.
For my money, the current iteration of iPad Pro gets everything about the bezel right. There’s a bezel around the screen, but it’s even, it’s unobtrusive, and Apple has the confidence to omit a logo. It affords focus, ensuring whatever you’re looking at doesn’t blend with the device’s surroundings. Rounded display edges soften the bezel’s impact. The bezel’s size ensures you can hold the iPad without covering what’s on the screen. And the bezel also houses Apple’s complex Face ID camera system, without an ugly notch or ‘hole punch’ impacting on the display.
I imagine Apple and many within the tech industry are desperate to make this bezel thinner. I think it’s great as it is – and the same goes for the bezels on my TVs and phones.
What’s particularly bad are Android phones that don’t have a bezel, and have rounded screen edges, which means it’s impossible to hold the phone without touching the screen. To mitigate this problem, some of them ship with settings that allow you to turn off sections of the touchscreen at the edges, which now means that when you do try to touch something that’s at the edge of the screen, it doesn’t register.
OTOH, I use my phones with cases anyways, which adds a little bit of width back, so it all kind of works out in the end.
It is funny that, when the iPad was originally introduced, Apple clearly added a huge bezel around the whole thing intentionally, to make it easy to hold the device. But as time has passed, Apple’s focus has shifted from usability to design, and alongside that shift, the bezel has gotten smaller.