As you might recall, the China-based company Letv launched three new devices quite recently, the Letv One, One Pro and Max. These three devices are actually the company’s flagship line of devices and look really sleek on the outside. If you however thought these are bezel-less devices, you’re wrong. Many leaks prior to the launch of these devices have been touting bezel-free smartphones, but these handsets have black bars all over the place. They devices sure look bezel-less when the display is turned off or the background on your display is black, but as soon as you fire up something in a different color you’ll notice black bars on every side of the display.
That being said, Xiaomi’s CEO Lei Jun actually decided to indirectly make fun of Letv’s offerings. In his newest Weibo (Chinese social network) post he said the following (rough translation): “If a smartphone with black bars around the display counts as a bezel-less device, then perhaps our Mi 4 handset counts as well?”. The Xiaomi Mi 4 is the company’s flagship for 2014, and ss you can see, this is quite an obvious dig at Letv. We’re still waiting for someone to release a true bezel-less smartphone. We’ve seen quite a few devices which come close to it, like the Sharp Aquos Crystal for example. Oppo’s R7 handset will also sport bezel on the sides according to the recently leaked video, but ZTE’s Nubia Z9 might not. The company’s General Manager himself said that this will be a bezel-less device and we’ve also seen many leaked images of this device already, not to mention that some side screen functionality of that device also leaked recently.
It remains to be seen how useful will these bezel-less devices will be. People have been arguing over that for quite some time now, one side claims that it will make the devices narrower and more compact, others say that we’ll press on the screen by accident all the time and what not. ZTE will announce the Nubia Z9 on May 6 and by the looks of it that might be the true bezel-free handset, stay tuned.