Xiaomi today showcased its new concept phone that has no ports and is made to appear like “just a screen”. Xiaomi is yet to name the phone and it claims to have 46 patents for the device. The concept device is the first smartphone with quad-curved waterfall screen. “The 88° hyper quad-curved screen design allows visual interfaces to flow over the phone’s surface like water,” boasts Xiaomi.
Almost the entire frame of the smartphone is covered by screen, while its body carries no ports or buttons. Also, there’s no speaker grill.

The new design ensures that almost all sides of the phone are covered by the display. All physical ports and buttons have their functions replicated on the screen itself. Other innovations include ultra-thin piezoelectric ceramics, flexible film display acoustic technology, third-generation under-display cameras, wireless charging, eSIM chips, pressure-sensitive touch sensors, and more.

The major challenge in making an all-sides curved display phone is bending the the glass uniformly on all the four sides. “Compared with ordinary curved glass, the difficulty of hot bending increases exponentially. Polishing a piece of such hyper-curved glass with a deep 88° bend on four sides requires self-developed glass processing equipment, hot bending under 800°C high temperature and pressure, four different polishing tools and up to more than ten complex polishing procedures. More importantly, behind such a piece of glass are thousands of attempts,” explained Xiaomi.