Oppo shows off new edgeless "waterfall screen"

Android makers look to have well and truly given up on waiting for Apple to take the smartphone design lead and are getting increasingly more experimental and interesting with their own designs. Oppo is no exception with its sleek Reno and Find X designs winning plaudits for their notchless designs. Now, the Chinese maker is back at it again showing off its new “waterfall screen” that eliminates bezel edges altogether.

The first time we saw anything this dramatic was with the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge from 2014 that bent the right-hand side of its display around adding edge screen functionality in the process. It, however, didn’t get a second-generation. The Oppo implementation delivers an even sharper curve that dives away at 88-degrees, but on both sides of the device. The short demo video shows how the icons slide right off the side of the screen but it doesn’t show any special OS-based utilization of the side of the display – at least at this stage.

Samsung, while the first to introduce curved displays on smartphones, has actually moved to less aggressive curves in its displays. This is partly because they can annoy users by registering accidental touches and also because the edges can be somewhat uncomfortable in the hand. While this approach avoids that latter problem, it is hard to see how it can avoid the former. It is also hard to see how it wouldn’t be highly prone to drop damage as even putting it in a case wouldn’t stop the display from being heavily exposed.

No details, however, on if or when we might see this in a shipping product from the company. However, given the comparison with the Find X, it does make one wonder if we have just seen its sequel.