Phone companies are relentlessly chasing the bezel-less future of smartphones. What started off with the notches (big ones, small ones, teardrop ones) and shifted to pop-up cameras, and hole-punch cameras, also saw the attempt by a bunch of brands to use sliders as the solution to hide the front facing cameras, and make an almost-completely bezel-less smartphone. The Mi MIX 3 might well be the best example of the sliding design (Oppo Find X is obviously another great one), but now, it looks as though Asus is not only choosing to go with the slider design, but also rethinking it to make it more useful, in some senses, and probably a hell of a lot more gimmicky in others.
A 5G dual slider, from one of ASUS’s Zenfone 5 designers. pic.twitter.com/OLrctdYbgz
The other render shared by Evan Blass, shows off an Asus phone, again with dual sliders, and again with the top slider bringing dual front facing cameras and two flashes, while the bottom slider is shown to have a touch-screen that brings contextual buttons (like EV, zoom, and a shutter button for the camera app, as shown in the render). That reminds me a lot of the TouchBar MacBook Pros, and it’ll need a lot of support from developers to actually make this bottom slider useful.
Another riff on the concept. pic.twitter.com/b1ti4VAeSv
Obviously, these are concept renders (so take these with a pinch of salt), and there’s no guarantees of any sort that Asus will actually make either of these devices, but if they do, it’ll definitely be a bold step from the company, and one that I’d really like to check out. I just hope it doesn’t die the death that the MacBook Pro TouchBar did, because no one uses it, honestly.
