lepton

There is no step three!!

My thought is you fill the entire front with the screen. Where the bottom bezel was, that's where the iOS dock sits. Add a fifth, permanent icon to the dock, which is the Home button. The Dock stays visible in an app unless the app specifically asks, in which case it can be called up with an up swipe from the bottom edge, when you get the control panel coming up, with the dock at its top.

I'm thinking you take the dock, which currently has 4 app icons in it, and move it down on the full-screen phone to where the bottom bezel is. Add a fifth icon in the middle, which is the on-screen Home button. Let that new semi-permanent dock be thought of as a touch strip, same as on the upcoming MacBooks. You can customize the new dock in each app, or eliminate it temporarily for full screen graphics. Also, move the top ear speaker to the top edge of the phone. Wrap the display around one or both sides of the phone, and have software volume and mute buttons there. Add some long-distance wireless charging and presto - iPhone 8!

This taptic thing - doesn't it border on the dreaded _skeuomorphism_? Actually, I like it, and I liked a lot of the skeuomorphism, I think it helps make the device more intuitive, just don't go overboard. As for the headphone jack, Apple says not only was it to make room for the taptic engine and some sound routing, but it also allowed the better camera. For the bigger camera, the cable coming off the top of the display needed to move, so they turned the display unit upside down so its cabling came out at the bottom of the phone, where the jack was, instead of the top.

Sony made an inexpensive mini-keyboard that hooked onto your PS3 controller. It had a tiny but full keyboard for thumb-typing into an RPG such as FFXIV,, but a key feature was it also let you control the cursor by lightly gliding your finger over the keyboard. I don't know what the technology was, but the functionality here seems similar.