Android

I do not, in fact, see what you did there.

You need a small camera to put it on a small bezel. But also, you need a small camera for a small punch hole, which is something that all flagship devices actively try to follow.

It's clearly true that the camera removes screen real estate if the screen of the Xperia 1 and the screen of the other phones have the same aspect ratio and size (the Xperia 1 is on the small side of modern flagships, but... yeah, they do), so the difference is between having a screen with a 2/3 mm bezel above it or having the exact same size and resolution screen with a hole in it. The screen is the same, one of them has a hole in it... so the hole is taking screen away.

And even if that wasn't the case and the screen was getting smaller, the hole is in the middle of your image. A smaller uninterrupted screen is better than an image with a hole in the middle. I don't understand how that is debatable, unless one is, you know, a bit of a moron. Yet here we are.

Now, I will give the notches that at least they poke from the top of the screen, so one could make the argument that the image isn't supposed to go over the line of the notch, and instead that space is for notifications and images should be coded to stay below that line. But of course then you have a WAY bigger "forehead" than any notchless phone would, and that still doesn't hold with the fact that most modern notches and punch holes are very clearly designed for the image to wrap around them in normal media viewing.

I do concede that most morons do not seem to care about the selfie camera, but hey, most morons also do take selfies, which is something I can't really wrap my head around. Then again, if truly nobody cared, then the industry wouldn't have spent a ton of money engineering under-display cameras and all sorts of flip cameras before deciding the compromises weren't worth it.

It's just a thing people have learned to live with on their least important device, like non-replaceable batteries, fixed, overpriced storage and lack of connectivity. The industry decided that was the weirdly enshittified trendy thing and consolidated around it and a lot of people find it annoying, just... not annoying enough to do anything about it. Welcome to the 21st century, I suppose.

Weirdly, you may have sold me on the 1 VII better than the guy telling me it's good. I may need to anchor myself into the sensible choice even at a premium before the enshittification train leads to a single design (two, if you count foldables that turn into a shitty tablet in exchange for being exceedingly frail and expensive).