The suggestions I'm seeing are yes hole punch, no hole punch, a screen you can use with one hand, just enough battery-filled thickness to have no camera bump, good camera, microsd, fingerprint sensor, headphone jack.
And one person wants a keyboard but I don't think they're suggesting that for this phone.
Once you decide if you want a hole punch or not, I see no issue with implementing the rest of those features in the same phone in a reasonable way.
The Homer was a car that Home Simpson built to exactly what they wanted without any tradeoffs for off the shelf components, trends, or sensibility of what currently was common.
It's also somewhat design by committee, with features like a more luxurious bubble for the adults, and a micro-bubble for the kids; presumably so you can ignore anything but the screams or silence.
I also suspect this fictional car might have been an ingredient in the market shifting from minivans to SUVs. Those don't have such great audio isolation but were even taller than the minivans (which were taller than station wagons). Or it could be the 'backup camera' finally reaching a tolerable price level.
Indeed. Those notches, hole-punches etc, I could do without. I very much prefer to have a bit of bezel and have a proper screen (preferably even with angular corners, rather than rounded corners). This also helps when handing the phone to somebody else to show them something... they have a place to hold the darn thing without accidentally swiping, tapping, or - worst of all - hitting the back button.
No, because there are so few of people with your opinion that those types of phones will not sell enough to recoup costs, much less make a profit. At most, you can buy a phone with a pop-up camera (the OnePlus 7T Pro is nice, although a few years old now) [0].
same. It's a shame OnePlus decided to drop the popup camera. They had a really solid mechanism. Going back to a screen with a notch or hole just feels primitive.
Front cameras are also useful for other stuff e.g. taking angled pictures with little visibility is much easier with the front facing camera because you can see what you're aiming at.
It can even take pictures in the dark because the display will be used as a floodlight, though in that case aiming doesn't really work unless the software brightening is sufficient to at least gain an idea.
Front camera also works as a mirror in a pinch, much easier than trying to aim the back camera then flipping the phone around and finding out how off you were.
Do people taking selfies even use the front camera? I feel like image quality is really rather poor for that use case but it's not my jam.
Nobody? I'm sort of in the same boat (I quite dislike video calls), but my extended family (from young to 60+) have started during pandemic and now continue to video call each other quite regularly - including group video calls.
As I said, not my preference and I rarely join, but for example my wife does video calls almost on a daily basis. So the "selfie" camera seems to be increasingly an important feature for the regular user.
I've seen it used once and to a disastrous result. I kinda feel like there are other workarounds too:
I remember one of the Motorola phones was designed for expansions, but that was pre-USB C. If you had a horizontally symmetrical phone, maybe widgets could solve the problem? Front facing and rear facing, while also being privacy respecting, no notch necessary, and similar resolution to boot. so maybe easier to source. Free up some room on the SOC and relieve some complexity while providing the added benefit of port protection. Presumably this could be applied to SD and obviously 3.5mm jacks.
Ok, let's just accept now that you live in an isolated bubble, if your experience with video calls is "I've seen it used once and to a disastrous result."
I'm not denying your experience, but it's not the experience of the vast majority of the modern world now, across all categories of people. Many people may not use video calls regularly, but most people have had more experience than "seen it used once."
The hole punch is a nice to have. A phone with a case that was half the area of a pixel 6 pro, and also had a top bezel would still have a perfectly usable screen.
On my G7 Play with LineageOS, I was able to "disable" the notch -- that is, draw a black bar around it, and have a proper rectangular display with a full-width status bar right below it.
Works great, especially considering the display is not quite small enough for me in the first place.