It was all foreshadowed last year by the Essential Phone, and kicked into the public consciousness with the iPhone X. The notches are here to stay, and 2018 will be the year where notched displays are the norm rather the exception. ASUS cringingly revealed its ZenFone 5 back at MWC. The new Huawei P20 and P20 Pro have notches on two different display aspect ratios. OnePlus chose to straight-up pre-announce that the OnePlus 6 will have a notch before it unveiled the phone. It's all but confirmed that LG's 2018 flagship will have the same.

Notches are happening, that's just how it is. They won't be here forever, as technology will soon get to the point where we can have "full screen" smartphones without the crutch of a notched portion, but for the next couple generations it's something we'll have to get used to. And I'm all for it — it's just a step along the steady march of innovation. My biggest issue with phones that have display notches right now is that very few companies are doing a good job (or any job, in many cases) of justifying the notch's existence on their phone. Verizon is offering the Pixel 4a for just $10/mo on new Unlimited lines ASUS showed us exactly what not to do with the announcement of the ZenFone 5, first making the notch bigger than it needs to be to hold the sensors and cameras, then unabashedly saying it copied Apple for the design with no further justification. Huawei didn't make any big justification of it one way or the other with the P20, but to its credit at least kept the width down to just what was necessary to hold the components inside and also added an easy way to fill in the portions of the screen next to the notch if you want a flat top edge. OnePlus has done the best job yet, and the OnePlus 6 isn't even official — the CEO explains simply that by having a notch, you're going to get more screen in the same package and the software will handle any potentially awkward app situations just fine. Look, it's possible to handle this properly!