Samsung Galaxy S Design Note

Recent 37Signals blog post talks about the trend to more and more of the real estate on mobile devices consisting of glass. That got me thinking. Obviously, glass is fragile. For the most part, that increased fragility is the tradeoff required for ever-larger display area. But I don't think it is a good idea to have any extra glass. With the Vibrant, there seems to be quite a bit of extra glass, especially in the vertical direction. Some of it provides the touch buttons, some of it seems completely unnecessary, just extended to the top and bottom edges of the device, for the sake of clean, visual uniformity.