Three clues why the Note 10's camera might pop up to take your selfie

On the Galaxy A80, the rear cameras and the front cameras are the same.

Samsung

And if the

Galaxy Note 10

or next year's Galaxy S11 had a sliding camera with lenses that take your selfies before rotating to take a portrait of your dog? Thanks to

that of Samsung

launching this week

Galaxy A80

, which only has this camera setup, the possibility is no longer pure fantasy.

After all, if Samsung thought that slide-and-swivel camera was good enough for a mid-range phone, it sure is good enough for the brand's most advanced Android device, right? say, I'm curious about the design, which I've been salivating over since I first saw it in 2014 on the

Oppo N1

, an innovative swivel camera phone for Asia.

The Oppo N1 started it all.

Low Aloysius/CNET

It's been years since

Phone(s)

that pivot, flip and other move has been all the rage, but that's all changing.

Foldable phones like Samsung's

Galaxy Fold

and

Huawei's Companion X

both arouse and reflect an interest in movable designs. Cameras, too, are increasingly mechanized to emerge from the belly of the beast in a variety of ways.

Sliding cameras and foldable trends meet the demand of ultimately giving you more screen to work with. In the case of a sliding camera, it is to solve the problem of sensors cluttering the screen. If "the notch "didn't win a lot of fans, maybe a slider cam array will.

Here are four reasons why it might make sense to see Samsung bring the Galaxy A80's sliding pivoting camera to a more premium Samsung phone like the Note 10 or Galaxy S11, and three reasons why it might not.

Samsung did not respond to a request for comment.

Read

:

After the Galaxy Fold fiasco, the Note 10 could be the hero phone Samsung needs

Better photos, smarter design

I've been intrigued by (ahem, obsessed with) the camera pivot since the days of the Oppo N1 because it struck me as an elegant solution.

Why double the cameras or use an inferior front sensor for your selfies, when you can also use your best cameras to take a self portrait? What if instead a company buys half a dozen cameras for the front

and

in the back, they only bought four to do the job of six.

This Galaxy A80 camera module slides out of the body, leaving you with an uninterrupted screen.

Samsung

More importantly, if the camera does double duty, the quality of your selfie image and the number of things you could potentially do with a selfie could also increase, as Samsung would no longer keep its best back cameras.

Samsung launches a model

The Galaxy S10 phones weren't the first to get the punch-hole camera "notch", using a screen that Samsung calls its Infinity-O design.

Galaxy S10 5G

the first Samsung phone with quad rear cameras. Samsung has recorded these two milestones for its mid-range Galaxy A series phones.

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6:26

It was the

Galaxy A8

which served as a training track for the

Galaxy S10 notch

, and the

Galaxy A9

which integrated four rear cameras four months before the launch of the S10.

The question is, why would Samsung use these more affordable devices as a test bed for more premium phones? Perhaps the company is trying to be more careful in introducing new technologies after the

Galaxy Note 7

disaster, in which reports of self-combustion batteries led Samsung to

call the device twice

.

Of course, a screen cutout is extremely unlikely to cause any flames, but the brand may be watching for early issues so they can correct course or delay the launch of a flagship phone if need be.

The Galaxy S10 5G wasn't Samsung's first phone with quad rear cameras.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Pop-up cams are so hot right now

It's also possible that Samsung's interest in pop-up cameras has everything to do with the trend of other smartphone makers in Asia (remember, Samsung originated in South Korea). Curiously, the three main proponents mechanized cameras --

Oppo

, Vivo and

OnePlus

(rumored) - are all Chinese brands owned by the same company,

BBK electronics

.

The

Oppo F11 Pro

and

Vivo Nex

both feature a small square pop-up selfie camera (but not the

Nex Dual Screen Edition

).The

OnePlus 7

is rumored to get the same.

Then there's last year's sexy

Oppo Find X

, whose entire cover lifted off like the Galaxy A80.And

Oppo Reno

, whose 16-megapixel front camera pops up at a tilt "like a shark's fin," my colleague Katie Collins colorfully said, "or a wedge of brie." (Mmmm, brieeeeee.)

Note that none of these pop-up designs rotate.

Samsung's biggest competitor Huawei, also from China, doesn't yet have a pop-up camera. But its foldable Mate X uses its camera array for both types of photos, making you turn the phone to take a selfie or a photo, and using one of its two exterior "screens" as a viewfinder.

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(Technically, there's really only one 8-inch screen that folds out, but when the Mate X is folded closed in phone mode, you get active screen windows on the front and in back)

Could Samsung's first foray into an all-in-one camera line be its way to innovate against Huawei's relentless approach? If so, it would definitely want a feature with the most impressive factor. on his

best phones

.

Mechanized parts may break one more thing

All the arguments for a swivel camera to spruce up the Galaxy Note 10 or Galaxy S11 don't make sense.

The more complex a phone is, the more likely it is that something will go wrong. What if something happens to the motor driving the action? Could the mechanism move if something gets stuck or stuck in inside?

The Vivo Nex was the first to release its camera, but not the last.

James Martin/CNET

Or what if the phone falls when the camera is pulled out and it takes a hard hit that prevents it from rolling back? What if the mechanism slows down over time?

Of course there will be concerns about wear and tear, and of course Samsung will have tested the slide-out camera within inches of its lifespan. But yeah, bad things sometimes happen to good phones and unflattering reports are a risk.

Does 6 cameras sound classier than 4?

In a time when more and more cameras are marketing a phone to make it look better - or at least perform better - could there be a problem where Samsung has to re-educate the public that the same camera on the front and on the back (I'm arbitrarily picking four) could be as good as six, the total number on the Galaxy S10 5G?

Would you like a reversible swivel camera?

Samsung

Note 10 vs Galaxy S11: Which would be more likely?

When it comes to determining which phone would be most likely to get a swivel camera, the Note 10 or the Galaxy S11, that's when my "pro" arguments break down.

We're about four months away from the Note 10 launch, if Samsung sticks to the August time frame. Hasn't a leak as big as a swing-out camera already surfaced? And would Samsung put a slide-out camera on it? a phone that already has its own identity with this S Pen stylus?

On the other hand, the Galaxy S series is more of the bread-and-butter family that has been the "safer" choice, while Samsung reserves some of its more interesting experiments for the Note series or other phones. .

The best hidden Galaxy S10 features you need to know now

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However, with

four Galaxy S10 devices

In 2019, it might make sense for Samsung to launch the most expensive Galaxy S11 variant of 2020 with a pop-up camera.

There's only one other possibility where a swivel camera could show up in a high-end Samsung phone, and that's foldable. Rumor has it (and also makes sense) that Samsung will make other foldable phones.

I don't know what the design would look like to create a sliding swivel camera wok, but I'm sure Samsung's designers and engineers have toyed with everything.

Originally published April 11 at 5:30 a.m. PT.