US phone fans rejoiced when Samsung launched theS24 serieswith flat edges all round, seemingly landing the killing blow on the curved screen. Flat panels aren’t as popular world-round though, and other manufacturers haven’t been as quick to go flat.
I’ll admit from the off, so you can get your pitchforks ready: I quite like a curved phone screen, which I still think is more comfortable to hold and worth the minuscule drop in usability.
Still, even flat phone fanatics might just be won over by Xiaomi’s latest curved screen. With its new14 Ultra flagship, Xiaomi has done its best to strike a middle ground with what it calls the ‘All Around Liquid Display’.
Trying to deliver the best of both worlds, the glass is curved on all four edges of the phone — the top and bottom too — but probably more subtly than you might imagine. There’s just the teeniest, tiniest curve to the corners of the glass, enough to soften the sharp edges without forcing your phone’s keyboard to wrap halfway around the frame.
The result is a phone that looks like it has a flat-screen but feels like it has a curved one, without ever falling into the annoyingly exaggerated ‘waterfall’ curvature that took over flagship phones a few years ago. In Xiaomi’s own words, it has “all of the positives and none of the negatives” of a traditional curved screen.
The boxy look of aGalaxy S24 UltraoriPhone 15 Pro Maxmay have aesthetic appeal, but with phones that size the flattened sides quickly start to dig into your palm. The Xiaomi 14 Ultra isn’t exactly petite either, not helped by its comically large camera array, but it’s more comfortable to hold than either of its out-sized rivals.
Xiaomi 14 Ultra changes the camera but not much else
Xiaomi’s new flagship is as iterative as the S24 Ultra, but the few changes are where it counts
Applying that slight curve to the top and bottom of the display is at least half the appeal. It sounds unnecessary, but when you think about how many times each day you swipe down from the very top of your smartphone to access your notifications or control center, that little softening and smoothing of the experience quickly feels worthwhile.
Are there downsides? Not really. Applying a screen protector gets a little more fiddly — the one flat phone benefit you really can’t get away from — but otherwise there’s not a whole lot to complain about here unless you really refuse to countenance any curve at all.
You won’t have a chunk of whatever you’re watching rendered onto the edges, you won’t have the keyboard spilling over and round, and you won’t suffer from accidental touch input registered by your palms along the frame. So come at me, curved phone haters. What are you going to moan about here?
