The smartphone industry’s great notch experiment took a sharp turn in December 2018. Samsung unveiled the Galaxy A8s with an Infinity-O display—a minimalist hole punch cutout for the front camera—just as Huawei prepared its own punch hole contender, the Nova 4, alongside the Honor View 20. What seemed like a race to kill the notch became a defining moment for phone design, and its echoes are still felt in laptops and monitors today.
The Concrete Shift: From Notch to Punch Hole
In the span of a single month, two major manufacturers independently converged on the same solution. Samsung’s Galaxy A8s debuted on December 10, 2018, featuring a 6.4-inch IPS LCD with a 6.7-millimeter hole punched into the top left corner. Samsung branded it “Infinity-O,” a name that suggested endless screen real estate. The front-facing 24-megapixel shooter sat entirely within this cutout, surrounded by active pixels that displayed notifications, status icons, and full-screen content.
Huawei wasn’t far behind. The Nova 4, announced on December 17, 2018, placed a similarly small 4.5mm hole in the top left of its 6.4-inch LTPS LCD. That tiny aperture housed a 25-megapixel front camera, and Huawei proudly noted it was the industry’s smallest at the time. The Honor View 20, a sister model aimed at a global audience, adopted the same 4.5mm blind hole technology, launching in early 2019 with a 48-megapixel rear camera and an almost bezel-less front.
These devices represented a concrete design leap. Instead of a wide notch that ate into the status bar, the hole punch was a discrete island that could be ignored or turned into a functional part of the interface. Some apps wrapped around it; others blacked out the top strip to hide it entirely. It wasn’t perfect—content could be interrupted by a permanent dot—but it felt far less intrusive than the thick black wedge that had dominated 2017 and 2018 flagships.
What It Meant for Everyday Users
For the average buyer, the hole punch was a visual novelty that promised more screen. The Galaxy A8s shipped with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio that stretched to the corners, unlike earlier notched designs that often left a thick bottom chin. Watching a YouTube video or playing PUBG Mobile, the camera hole simply floated in a sea of pixels, and after a few days it faded from notice—or so early reviewers claimed.
Notification bars adapted quickly. Samsung’s One UI and Huawei’s EMUI both shifted status icons left and right of the cutout, effectively splitting the bar. This meant no icon would be hidden, though time and battery percentage had to sit to the right. For left-handed users, the top-left placement was particularly visible, but it rarely interfered with touch targets since the hole was surrounded by a ring of inactive touch area.
Privacy-conscious users had another win: the hole punch was a physical reminder that a camera was there, always watching. No retractable or pop-up mechanism to fail, and no notch that suggested a larger hidden array. The trade-off? Dust could gather in the tiny recess, and screen protectors became a nightmare. Tempered glass needed a precise alignment, and many early protectors left an ugly ring around the hole.
For power users and developers, the punch hole introduced a new class of screen design guidelines. Apps had to account for a “display cutout” that was a single circle, not a full-width strip. Google’s Android 9 Pie already included APIs for cutout handling, but the A8s and Nova 4 pushed developers to test edge cases. A floating action button that landed exactly under the camera was a common bug in those early months.
The Industry Context: How the Notch Lost Its Crown
The notch’s fall from grace was swift. Apple’s iPhone X had kicked off the trend in 2017, and by mid-2018, even budget Android phones sported a notch. The problem was perception: users associated notches with lower-cost imitations, and many complained about lost screen estate when watching videos. Essential Phone tried to differentiate with a tiny teardrop notch, but the industry wanted true edge-to-edge, and the hole punch was the next viable step.
Samsung’s Infinity-O wasn’t just a hardware trick; it was a branding exercise. The company had long mocked the notch in its marketing, and the hole punch allowed it to claim innovation while still using LCD panels (the Galaxy A8s wasn’t AMOLED). Huawei, fresh from its P20 Pro camera dominance, used the Nova 4 to show off its ability to miniaturize camera modules, a message that resonated with component suppliers.
Honor’s View 20 took the baton globally. Announced in January 2019 at CES, it bundled the 4.5mm punch hole with a flagship Kirin 980 processor and Link Turbo technology for Wi-Fi and cellular aggregation. At a price point of around €349, it undercut rival notched phones and made the case that cutting-edge design didn’t need a four-figure price tag.
The broader context was a display technology arms race. Samsung’s flexible OLEDs had already birthed curved “Edge” screens, and the Infinity-O was a cheaper way to achieve a similar wow factor on LCDs. LG, BOE, and Sharp quickly developed their own hole-punch panels, ensuring the design would spread rapidly.
The Ripple Effect on Windows Laptops and Beyond
It didn’t take long for the hole-punch concept to jump from phones to larger screens. Laptop makers had been flirting with minimal bezels for years, but the camera remained a sticking point: put it in the top bezel, and the lid gets thicker; move it to a pop-up or nose-cam, and it looks compromised. The hole-punch seemed like an elegant fix.
In 2021, ASUS launched the ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED with a small punch-hole webcam in the screen’s top left corner, directly cribbing the smartphone playbook. Acer followed with the Swift 3X and Spin 5, using a 2-millimeter cutout for a 720p camera. These weren’t groundbreaking machines, but they proved the concept worked on a 13- or 14-inch panel. Microsoft’s own Surface devices held out, preferring a larger top bezel for Windows Hello sensors, but the trend has continued to influence gaming laptops and convertible designs where every millimeter of bezel is hated.
Even monitors got in on the act. Models aimed at ultrawide gaming started appearing with tiny cutouts for IR webcams, though adoption has been slower due to the permanence of desktop setups. The bigger lesson from the A8s and Nova 4 was a software one: how to gracefully handle an irregular screen shape. Windows 11’s updated snapping tools and rounded corner aesthetics align with this philosophy.
For Windows users today, the legacy of the 2018 hole-punch war is a landscape where laptop bezels have shrunk dramatically, and the webcam, while often still mediocre, is no longer a design albatross. The software tricks pioneered on Android—dynamic notification bars, dark mode “hiding” the hole, adaptive wallpapers—have direct equivalents in Windows. If you use an OLED laptop with a punch-hole camera, you can thank a mid-range Samsung and Huawei phone from half a decade ago.
What to Watch Next
Under-display camera technology is the logical successor, and it’s already shipping on phones like the ZTE Axon 40 Ultra and Samsung’s latest foldables. For laptops, however, picture quality is too low for conferencing. The punch-hole remains the pragmatic middle ground. As long as we demand bright, high-res webcams, expect to see more tiny cutouts on your next Windows device. The Galaxy A8s and Nova 4 started a design language that’s far from finished.