We have three new iPhones, but if you judge by all the news and talk, you would think Apple had just unveiled one: the Apple iPhone X.
The new iPhone X is certainly the one that has everyone’s attention with its new edge-to-edge screen and compact size, but with a prohibitive starting price of $1,000 for the base 64GB model, you might wonder if there is an alternative.
Of course, there is! In fact, the iPhone X is late to the bezel-less screen game, and we round up 5 great Android options for a lower price, but with a similarly great design and cameras. With no further ado, here is our selection of the iPhone X bezel-less alternatives.
The Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus were among the first phones in the “bezel-less” trend. They have one of the finest Super AMOLED screens out there with lively, vivid colors. The Note 8 is just like the other two, but bigger and with the accurate S Pen on board that allows you to quickly take notes or get creative with drawings.
The Galaxy S8 in particular is available at nearly half the price of the iPhone X and the other two are also great alternatives. One big downside with them? The fingerprint scanner. It’s positioned weirdly to the side of the camera, where it is hard to reach and you will often smudge the camera instead of the finger reader.
Google’s new Pixel 2 XL comes with one glaring issue: an OLED screen that gets very bluish once you tilt the phone just slightly, and it can suffer from a ghosting effect, but if you are not pedantic about having the absolute display. the Pixel 2 XL delivers. It’s a stunning phone: it has arguably the best camera ever put in a phone, a clean version of Android that already has the latest update and is guaranteed to be first in line in the future, it has solid battery life and it performs admirably well.
The Essential Phone is a true design gem with its ceramic back and a solid construction. It has an extremely high screen to body ratio with a very distinct, “notch” design where a tiny cutout at the top of the front is made for the front camera. It all blends together nicely when you have the notification bar at the top, or if you have a black screen, but is otherwise noticeable. The Essential Phone lacks branding, runs on a clean version of Android and comes with the promise for timely updates.
The LG V30 is the company’s best phone as of fall 2017. With a 6-inch display and an edge-to-edge display, the V30 is actually a little smaller than the 5.5-inch OnePlus 5 that has a traditional, 16:9 display with bezels on the top and bottom. And that’s quite the achievement. The V30 – unlike Samsung phones – has its fingerprint on the back, below the camera and properly centered, so it’s really easy for your finger to reach it.
The G6 has a 5.7-inch full-screen display, but it lacks some of the V30‘s media capabilities, and has a less refined camera experience. It makes up with a much lower price. It also looks a lot like the V30, though, and features a very sleek glass and metal build.
The bezel-less Huawei Mate 10 Pro features a sleek design and one of the finest cameras on Android. It performs good as well: equipped with Huawei’s own Kirin 970 system chip, this powerful phone is the first around with a neural engine built-in. Battery life is another strong point for the Mate 10 Pro.
The Xiaomi Mi Mix was certainly one of the most interesting products of 2016: in fact, one could argue it was the device that kickstarted the bezel-less design trend. In 2017, we have the much more practical and smaller in size Mi Mix 2 with even less bezel and a more refined look and feel. The Mi Mix 2 features a 6-inch display with an 18:9 aspect ratio, narrower than the wide 17:9 screen on the original Mix. It runs top-grade silicon with the Snapdragon 835 chip on board and comes in three versions: 64GB, 128GB and 256 gigs. The phone also features an improved camera, now with the Sony IMX386 sensor and with 4-axis image stabilization.
