I love rounded corners and is the first thing I was most impressed with, with the Librem 5. Now it’s said to be removed in Evergreen. That’s stupid in my opinion. Sorry for the language.
It’s said to be covering regions of the phone, like videos or apps in fullscreen. It makes the phone look better imo. How come Android and iPhone achieve this? They made it work with the rounded corners. Not remove them.
Maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention, but I still don’t understand what “rounded corners” is referring to here. The body/chassis of the phone itself? Or the screen? Or borders/corners over the screen where it meets the chassis/case? Or the dialog/UI elements?
In my opinion, rounded corners in the screen are a bad idea. Rounded corners waste screen space and cut off the corners when watching full screen video. On my Android phone, I get annoyed by the round corners. Also, the round corners will probably make it harder to port the Librem 5 to other operating systems (UBports, postmarketOS, etc.).
Some types of “innovation” simply make technology less useful.
Rounded corners also make window management much more complicated. If somebody wants them, it should always be possible to just keep those pixels black
perhaps there’s a confusion here. So there are following options in the game
rounded screen corners (lcd matrix with rounded corners, the rest is irrelevant)
rounded chassis corner (lcd matrix with square corners, the chassis face is with rounded corners)
rounded screen bezels (lcd matrix with square corners, the chassis face is irrelevant, the chassis profile is with rounded corners)
Rounded viewport (everything is irrelevant, the logical viewport is with rounded corners - eg as roundr on android does it).
Not sure which of those is meant in OP but since the android was brought into picture as an example I think it is about either option 3 or 4. Although latest pixel I think is making option 1, 2 and 4 to fill entire face surface with the screen.
As for love/hate - i don’t care as long as logical viewport is square (eg no need to have quirks in UI for the option with rounded corners).
That makes the phone look more soft and not just a big block of pixels as a square.
I own a Samsung S7 Edge. And the 90° angles are my biggest hate on the phone. Seriously looks bad. Everything now adays is rounded, Google has been making redesign changes on everything, and that everything is rounded corners from buttons to the UI itself. And to hardware. That’s because most people find rounding of the corners more attractive, soft, nice and polished.
As pointless as it is, I must admit, it has grown on me since I last commented on it. It is a subtractive feature though, you actually get less screen area. If it were an OLED screen I would be completely against having rounded corners but with LCD I actually have grown to like it. It doesn’t devastate me that they are changing it to square though. It is more practical and I can see that it will probably suit some user interfaces better. I haven’t voted yet because I might change my mind again.
Well that’s true. The thing is though, with LCD you actually see the corners of a black screen if you aren’t in a bright room or if you’re looking slightly on an angle. It’s been very obvious in some of the videos that have been uploaded.
Since the screen is 18:9 and most videos that I watch are 16:9 or 4:3, I don’t think that would bother me. I guess movies would often be wider though.
the solution is to just stick some magic round-my-corners black-tape on that display similar to the manner you would keep a horse from looking sideways by using lateral-blinds …
Rounded corners look great with the default UI, and are quite beautiful, but if you want to run anything else they are a significant disadvantage. I sometimes like to run a desktop UI on my phone, with a keyboard and mouse, to convert it into something closer to a desktop form factor, but dektop UIs are not designed for rounded corners, meaning that rounded corners would break one of the primary purposes I have for getting this phone: running a desktop UI just a bit better than Android does with LinuxDeploy and X11 XSDL.
