The ideal smartphone is all screen with no buttons or borders - here's how close it is to becoming a reality

Smartphone makers have had us drooling for years over the idea of a phone that's all screen, with no buttons or borders to interrupt the pure design. But try as they might, the concept hasn't exactly come to fruition. The most popular devices have come with extremely thin bezels, or, like the iPhone X, feature thin bezels with a notch towards the top of the phone to house the phone's camera and all its front-facing sensors.

Still, we've been seeing more patents and murmurings of an all-screen phone. Here are some details on what may or may not be in the smartphone pipeline: