Chinese original equipment manufacturer ZTE has filed a patent application for a smartphone concept that features dual display notches. The patent was filed with China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) on September 13, 2017, indicating that ZTE has been considering such a cutout-equipped design for quite some time now, along with other Android OEMs such as Samsung, who filed two patents in March with SIPO, with one of them showing a smartphone with a similar design cue.
As indicated by the patent image seen above, ZTE’s concept includes two notches, one at the top of the display and another at the bottom. It is easy to see that the bottom cutout houses a home button instead of a speaker like the one found on the recently revealed ZTE Iceberg concept. The renders of that particular device have been published by iF International Forum Design earlier this month. According to ZTE, the company expects that it would take up to two years to commercialize the product in question, provided the idea makes it to the production phase at all. Based on those renders, the ZTE Iceberg uses a glass sandwich design meant to resemble an ice fragment so that all of its four corners are transparent. Its top display notch contains a front-facing camera, earpiece, and a proximity sensor, while the bottom cutout houses a speaker, unlike the newly patented design.
It remains to be seen if the ZTE Iceberg with two notches makes it to the market, especially given the current sanctions imposed on the company by the United States government. However, even if ZTE does end up commercializing the device, it isn’t expected to release it until mid-2019 at the earliest. In the meantime, the firm will be fighting off the aforementioned sanctions that saw it receive a ban on purchasing and licensing American products such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips and Google’s Android OS for the next seven years.