The LG G3 was officially unveiled last week with a minimalist bezel, but the manufacturer has told us how it had hoped to reduce the phone’s edging even further.
“My initial expectation was that I wanted to go for even slimmer bezels,” Chul Bae Lee, Vice President of LG’s Mobile Communications Design Lab said of the G3 which features a near bezel-free design to offer a stunning edge-to-edge display.
Suggesting that the G3’s whole design was focussed around bringing a large screen to a compact handset which fits comfortably within the hand, Lee has told us how – despite pushing the smartphone market into new territories in terms of screen to frame ratios – the G3’s bezels failed to meet his expectations.
“In order to accommodate this large screen, the bezel has to be very slim, that’s a given condition,” he said speaking exclusively with TrustedReviews.
“I kept squeezing my engineers to make it slimmer and slimmer. They are all my friends but they didn’t meet my expectations and this is the best we can do as of today. It is still one of the best in the market and it is all related to the technology development as well.”
Although having hoped to go even slimmer with the phone’s bezel, Lee has detailed how a number of factors and technological restrictions held his ambitions back.
“Design is an art of compromise,” he told us. “If I make the bezels even thinner, they will be very brittle and our quality standards say we have to be able to drop the phone from four feet.”
He added: “If I made a very thin bezel I would have had to use thicker glass, so I have to control the balance.
“For me this is the perfect balance as of today. We can go a little bit slimmer and we can go a little bit bigger, but this is the nice balance.”
With LG having been criticised for bestowing the G3 with a plastic body designed to try mimic the look of a metal handset, the designer has revealed how moving to metal would have had negative effects on the overall finish.
He said: “If we had used a metal material, the bezel would have had to have been double [in thickness].”
The LG G3 packs a 5.5-inch QHD display with a 2560 x 1440p display and will hit UK retailers on July 1.
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