Why the Google Pixel 3 XL has a 'chin'...!
After weeks with the Pixel 3 XL, an aspect of the phone's slightly odd design dawned on me.
The 'notch' at the top of the phone has rightly caused controversy because of its depth - it's needed apparently because of the size of the front facing cameras and the use of a decent earpiece speaker. Regardless, it does let content flow up in the 'ears' to the top of the phone and it works well enough on the whole.
But the bottom 'chin' looks wrong when you first see the phone - why is it quite so large? One theory is that it's to make room for (again) a loud speaker (and it's very loud), but I have another.
You see, when a design takes the screen almost to the bottom edge of the phone and there's a notch at the top, media watching suffers by the playback window being off-centre.
I realise that this is something of a nit-pick at some other phones, but could one reason for the Pixel 3 XL's bottom chin be that it matches the notch's depth, meaning that when watching cinematic media (Netflix shown below, but also Prime Video and others), the picture is almost perfectly centred in the phone's frame?
When watching (as sketched out above), the viewing experience is arguably better than if the display had gone to the bottom edge and the picture was then skewed slightly to the right.
Or maybe I'm clutching at straws to justify a design decision that Google made for other reasons? What do you think?
The 'notch' at the top of the phone has rightly caused controversy because of its depth - it's needed apparently because of the size of the front facing cameras and the use of a decent earpiece speaker. Regardless, it does let content flow up in the 'ears' to the top of the phone and it works well enough on the whole.
But the bottom 'chin' looks wrong when you first see the phone - why is it quite so large? One theory is that it's to make room for (again) a loud speaker (and it's very loud), but I have another.
You see, when a design takes the screen almost to the bottom edge of the phone and there's a notch at the top, media watching suffers by the playback window being off-centre.
I realise that this is something of a nit-pick at some other phones, but could one reason for the Pixel 3 XL's bottom chin be that it matches the notch's depth, meaning that when watching cinematic media (Netflix shown below, but also Prime Video and others), the picture is almost perfectly centred in the phone's frame?
When watching (as sketched out above), the viewing experience is arguably better than if the display had gone to the bottom edge and the picture was then skewed slightly to the right.
Or maybe I'm clutching at straws to justify a design decision that Google made for other reasons? What do you think?
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