Surface Pro 4 to feature a borderless display? What a terrible idea!
Infinity. Endless. Borderless. Today’s OEMs are obsessed with creating display panels that have no edges. Whether it’s Dell and its new XPS 13 (confirmed), or Microsoft and the forthcoming Surface Pro 4 (rumor), everyone seems to be jumping on the "bezel free" bandwagon.
What a terrible idea!
Seriously, as someone who spends a great deal of time in "tablet mode" on a Windows 10 device (Surface 3), I’ve grown to appreciate the value of a good bezel. The capability to hold the device at any angle, and without concern for accidentally touching something onscreen, is a huge usability booster. And the Surface 3’s bezel gives me plenty of space to grab when I’m on the move.
That meaty bezel also makes it easier to initiate swipe gestures. I cut my tablet computing teeth on a BlackBerry Playbook, which means I’m a big fan of gesture-based UX mechanisms. And though Microsoft tempered its "edginess" a bit with Windows 10 (much to the chagrin of Windows 8.1 fans), "swiping in" from various angles is still a big part of the Windows 10 touch-first experience (making usable bezel size a prerequisite).
So what happens when you combine a touch-first UX with a nearly bezel-free design? You lose the ability to swipe -- at least reliably. Take my poor, abandoned (by Samsung) Galaxy Avant. When used "naked" and without any protective case, the Avant provides barely enough bezel to initiate an edge gesture from the side. Put a decent bumper case on the phone -- like the simple red and black Samsung model that I bought for mine -- and it becomes nearly impossible to get enough edge into the motion to make it work reliably.
In fact, this is a problem that’s plaguing many similar "reduced bezel" phone designs. And now Dell (and if you believe the rumors, Microsoft) is trying to foist this same broken UX dynamic onto us PC users. We understand that these so-called "Infinity" displays look cool, and that OEMs like Dell are desperate to differentiate their products in a crowded market. But before they all rush down that bezel-free rabbit hole, it might behoove these OEMs to take a step back and consider how that decision will affect usability in a touch-first setting.
Bottom Line: "Infinity" type displays are cool, deliver great visuals for the PR team, and have come to symbolize a bold design aesthetic in an otherwise drab PC landscape. They’re also utterly useless in a touch-first UX context. Here’s hoping those god awful rumors (the Winbeta.org mockups are truly hideous looking) about the Surface Pro 4’s display are just that, rumors, and that the engineering folks managed to rein-in all the Jony Ive wannabes in their design department before it was too late.
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