Remember the Pixel 3 and its MASSIVE unibrow?? I do. Google makes some amazing phones, but boy, the Pixel 3 felt like their design team’s aesthetics department was on vacation. The 3 had LARGE bezels, and the 3XL was one of the most awkwardly notchy phones on the planet. I won’t even get into analyzing the Pixel 4 only because Google hardly sold any units of it… but aesthetically, it definitely solved the notch problem.
Meet the Pixel Vector, a smartphone concept that challenges the notion that phones need to have thick bezels, hole-punches, or notches to have front-facing cameras. The Pixel Vector cleverly uses the negative space between the phone and the screen’s corner to throw in not one, but two front-facing cameras. The phone’s sharp edges and display’s rounded corners provide the perfect triangular negative spacing for cameras, spacing them out too, so they can perform 3D scanning required for facial recognition. On the back, the Vector goes back to the basics of having a single-lens camera rather than the massive ‘box of donuts’ you’d see on the Pixel 4. Sticking to the tenents of aesthetics over engineering, but without compromising on the latter, the Pixel Vector manages to be a good phone that’s also good looking. What do you think?
Designer: Ferdinand Aichriedler