Tecno's 'Bezelless' Concept Phone Removes the Screen's Black Border

At IFA Berlin, budget brand Tecno showed a concept phone with no black border around its 6.78-inch OLED screen. Here's how it works.

Tecno, a budget phone maker in the same corporate family as Itel and Infinix, has built a concept device that erases the black border from around a smartphone screen. Called the Bezelless, the phone was shown ahead of its unveiling at the IFA trade show in Berlin, and it is not a product anyone will be able to buy. The company built it to prove a single point: a screen can end right at the edge of a phone, with no black strip in between.

The device carries a 6.78-inch OLED panel running at 1.5K resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate. On the prototype, there is no visible black outline around the display. Look at the phone straight on, and the screen simply runs up to the light silver frame. Only when tilted at an angle does a sliver of a black line appear beneath the edge of the frame.

How the design works

The OLED panel still has an inactive strip along its edge, as all such panels do. Tecno's trick is to tuck that strip out of sight beneath the frame. The engineering behind it relies on two separate layers of cover glass. The upper layer stretches all the way to the frame's edge. The lower glass layer, along with the display itself, continues underneath the frame and out of view.

That approach forced Tecno to assemble the phone in reverse. Rather than fitting the screen from the front, as is standard, the company mounts the display from the back of the handset. Holding the screen in place then calls for a bespoke adhesive, applied between the frame and the lower sheet of glass.

The result is a frame that appears to be a fraction thicker than the one on a typical modern phone. Placed next to this year's Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus, the Bezelless shows marginally less material around its screen, though the difference is slight. The payoff is visual. Android's interface now runs to the edge, and photos and videos display without a border on two of their sides. Removing the bezel does not fix letterboxing, so the other edges keep their black bands.

Specs and design flourishes

Because it is a concept, the internal hardware is beside the point, but Tecno fitted real components. The phone runs on a MediaTek Dimensity 7400e chipset paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It packs a 6,000mAh battery while staying slim and light, a combination that points to silicon-carbon cell technology. On the back, an arrangement that looks like three cameras is actually two: a 50-megapixel main sensor and an 8-megapixel ultrawide. The front holds a single 32-megapixel selfie camera, which Tecno left in place rather than hiding it beneath the display to complete the all-screen look.

The rear adds a few touches of its own. A red notification LED sits alongside a butterfly motif rendered with a 3D effect, so the wings seem to lift off the surface as light shifts across it. Tecno has form here. At MWC earlier this year it displayed other concept phones, including one with a color-changing E Ink back, one with built-in neon, and a magnetic modular design that accepted a set of matching accessories. None of those has reached the market.

Tecno frames the Bezelless in grand terms, saying it "redefines how users will interact with their phones in the AI era." In practice, the change is cosmetic. Phone makers stopped trimming bezels years ago because the black borders had shrunk to a millimeter or so and most buyers no longer minded. Erasing that last strip makes the display feel roomier and allows either a slightly bigger screen or a slightly smaller body, but it does not add any real function.

The wider significance sits with what comes next. Apple has been rumored for some time to be working on an edge-to-edge iPhone timed to the model's 20th anniversary next year. By getting a working bezel-free screen into a reviewer's hands, Tecno has shown that such a device is buildable - and that the Apple rumor may be more plausible than it sounded.

Tecno Bezelless, bezel-free phone, concept phone, IFA Berlin, OLED display, MediaTek Dimensity 7400e, edge-to-edge iPhone, smartphone design