By now you may have noticed that the
new Samsung Galaxy S10s
have a new "hole punch" design on the front camera that allows for thinner bezels along the top of the screen. Samsung went with this design to avoid the universally unpopular notch. the S10E and S10 have a circular hole punch, while the S10 Plus has a longer crop to accommodate the dual-lens selfie camera.
But while this adds more screen real estate for these devices, some might find the hole punch a bit annoying. If you want your phone to have a more classic look, or at least want to disguise the hole punch and make it less noticeable, there are two ways to cut out the new S10 phones hide.
Option 1: Turn off the punch
If you don't mind sacrificing a bit of screen to avoid the camera crop, one option is to get rid of it altogether. You can do this by going to your settings menu and selecting Display > Full screen apps. You'll see that the first option at the top is "Hide front camera".
grid view
Enabling this will add a black bar to the top of your device. While this effectively hides the hole punch effect, unfortunately it looks like there's a thicker bezel at the top. It also looks disproportionate since the Bottom does not adjust to provide more balanced placement of the display between forehead and chin. The black bar is still present in other display modes such as full screen video and camera.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Option 2: dress it up!
For those who don't want to sacrifice their infinity screen, hiding the hole punch is the more fun option
Use background images to playfully dress up the cleavage
.
There are already plenty of resources to find some fun wallpapers that do this. Our favorite so far is on the subreddit
r/S10 backgrounds
, where community members regularly upload creative wallpapers. You can find everything from punch to shuffle with
a sloth is hanging from a thick branch
, to more whimsical ones like the hole punch that deftly turns in the... er... (
opens new window, have a look
war of stars
indispensable guide for vehicles and ships
), ahem, "superlaser focus lens" on the Death Star.
Just download your favorite and then go to Backgrounds and Themes in the settings menu. Find the photo in your gallery and set it as wallpaper and/or lock screen.
In the future, Samsung could offer more creative wallpapers like these in new software updates. But for now, if you can't fight it, have fun with it and embrace what you can now do with the new S10s.
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