The Google Pixel 5 has a lot to unpack as the search engine giant appears to be doing everything it can to avoid the mistakes it made with last year's Pixel 4. This includes expanding the screen area.

Google added a proper full-screen display this year, with a hole-punch camera and an ugly notch out of the way. However, there is a hidden secret under the display in the form of a speaker.

Anyone who has had a good look at the Pixel 5 will notice that there is no obvious speaker grille at the top of the phone. This is not at all unusual, as cell phone companies have gotten surprisingly good at hiding their speakers. In this case, however, that grill isn't actually there, because it is instead hidden under the screen.

This is because Google has released an official hardware diagram of the Pixel 5, showing which hardware features are where. The bottom speaker is in its usual place on the bottom of the phone, but the top speaker is nowhere to be found on the top bezel.

The speaker appears to be in the middle in the official images, but one Pixel 5 screen protector has a cutout, suggesting that the speaker is positioned slightly to the left. It is unclear why the cutout is necessary, since the speaker below the display already needs to send vibrations through the screen itself. Perhaps Google is trying to make sure that whatever you are listening to does not get in the way.

Under-display speakers are not necessarily new; we've seen them before on devices like the LG G8, Huawei P30 Pro, and Huawei P40 Pro. Nevertheless, they are not particularly common, and many handset manufacturers have opted instead for a more discreet and unobtrusive top speaker.

The under-display speaker is also not particularly groundbreaking, so it's not surprising that Google didn't bother to tell us about it at the Pixel 5 launch event. In fact, many people won't even know it's there.

Hopefully, this will trigger a more widespread inclusion of under-display speaker technology and bring us a little closer to the truly uninterrupted full-screen displays that phone makers have been promising us: the OnePlus 7, with its pop-up selfie camera. This is possible, and Samsung's Galaxy S21 could do so with an under-display camera, but recent rumors have cast a question mark over this killer upgrade.