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iPhone 7s May Sport Curved Glass and AMOLED Display (bgr.com) 113

anderzole quotes a report from BGR: With calls for Apple's upcoming iPhone models to be "spectacular," it appears that pundits and those who have been quick to proclaim that we've reached "peak iPhone" have nothing to worry about. While we'll know what type of wild new features the iPhone 7 will incorporate in just about three months, a new report from reputed analyst Ming-Chi Kuo provides us with some interesting insight as to what Apple has planned for 2017 when it releases what will presumably be called the iPhone 7s. According to a research note Kuo provided to investors, Apple is busy working on an iPhone model with curved pieces of glass and an AMOLED display. What's more, the report relays that Apple also has plans to shake up its iPhone lineup with a model sporting a 5.8-inch display. Further, Kuo believes that the bezels on the iPhone 7s will be smaller than they are on Apple's current iPhone lineup.
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iPhone 7s May Sport Curved Glass and AMOLED Display

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  • May? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 27, 2016 @12:11PM (#51787041)

    Iphone 7 may have a Pez dispenser

    what is the point of "may" stories

    • The 7 Plus will have a Steve Jobs head. It will be stubbornly stiff and give you candies that taste stale, but you can't seem to stop eating.
    • by Lumpy ( 12016 )

      OHH! I love pez! wait it wont be PEZ...

      It will be apple-treats (tm) and they will have steve jobs face on them. and be .1mm narrower than a pez and 1mm shorter to make sure you dirty bastards wont just use PEZ and steal from the corporation.

      you dirty apes.

    • 5.8 inches? Finally the perfect size.

      I might actually have to buy an Apple product if that prediction comes true...

  • by Mr D from 63 ( 3395377 ) on Sunday March 27, 2016 @12:12PM (#51787051)
    Are curved phone displays really needed or useful? I don't see any benefit. Maybe a phone that fits better in your rear pants pocket, but that's about it.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Well, it may allow you to hold it wrong in a different way!

    • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Sunday March 27, 2016 @12:27PM (#51787141)

      Are curved phone displays really needed or useful? I don't see any benefit....

      The sales of iPhones have plateaued, some even saying they are starting a decline. Apple has a market saturation problem and a product maturity problem.

      .
      Apple needs to do a flash in the pan type of thing in order to regenerate significant interest in the iPhone.

      • Apple has a Tick-tock product system for iPhone, with the 6 and 6+ being last years models, and 6S and 6S+ being this years. Of course the 6 and 6+ being new form factors had huge sales. The 6S and 6S+ being speed bumps in the same form factor are not as popular. Provided the iPhone 7 provides something new, it'll be the tick part of the cycle and sales will rush ahead again.

        • Maybe...

          Frankly, the problem Apple has, at least to me, is that I can't imagine anything else I need or want in a phone.

          The iPhone 6 Plus is fast, the screen is just the right size (no bigger please), the camera is really nice, it has enough memory and storage, etc.

          What else do I need in a phone?

          I plan to keep the 6 Plus for a long time.

          • I would like them to continue on the trend of reducing the size of the internal bits, but rather than also reducing the size of the case, just fill it with more battery.

            My iPhone 6 lasts for two days as it is, but I'd rather it last even longer. Let's get back to weekly charging cycles like we were with the Nokias back in the day.

      • i wish that instead of innovating by making the phones as thin as a credit card, they did some common sense things to fix glaring problems:
        * siri sounds like a 50's robot, or a 90's speech synthesized robot. Apple has been surpassed here by goog, waze, alexa, pretty much anything I have heard.
        * the controls for cut, copy and paste are a PITA.
        * the layout of apple music is messy and difficult to use compared to google music and other similar apps.
        * battery life, duh.
        * apple maps is really bad about predictin

        • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          * siri sounds like a 50's robot, or a 90's speech synthesized robot. Apple has been surpassed here by goog, waze, alexa, pretty much anything I have heard.

          From what I've read, that actually was intentional. Apple's actually done a ton of work with respect to text to speech, and even in the 90s they were able to do natural sounding voices. Heck, MacInTalk could *sing*. (And this was the mid-90s). Or heck, do a robotic voice impression. And this was on a 68K Mac.

          Apparently the reason is Apple wants you think

    • I've seen numerous curved screens with cracks on the edges. Makes me wonder why I would want one which has a "glass edge" to fall on, which seems a natural failure point.

      • ... Makes me wonder why I would want one which has a "glass edge" to fall on, which seems a natural failure point....

        You want one because Apple sez it's The Next Big Thing.

        .
        (even though others have had it for a while)

      • your dropping it wrong.....says apple when "screen-gate" happens
    • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Sunday March 27, 2016 @02:04PM (#51787617)
      Contrary to the anti-Samsung rhetoric among the press about the "uselessness" of curved displays, curves help stiffen and strengthen an otherwise flat structure by converting stresses along the weak axis (normal to the screen - its thinnest dimension) into shear stresses which allow a stronger (thicker) axis to take some of that stress. Take a sheet of paper and stand it on its end. It's not even strong enough to support its own weight. Now curve that paper by rolling it into a cylinder. It's now strong enough to support itself plus your phone. With a flat sheet of paper, a tiny force against its thinnest dimension would cause it to flop over. When you curve the paper, this same force ends up partially redirected into compressing and stretching the length of the paper in the part of the curve that runs in the same direction as the force. It's why the body panels on your car are curved. If they left the sheet metal flat, just leaning on the car would permanently deform it.

      If you look at the Samsung Edge display, imagine you're sitting on the phone so the top and bottom are bent towards each other. With a flat display, the bending moment is around the thinnest axis of the display so the display offers almost no resistance to such bending. But with a curved display, such bending moments are now partially acting along the thicker glass of the curved edge. To bend the display, you literally have to compress that glass. Glass is really strong in compression. (It's weak in tension, but that's compensated for by tempering. Tempered glass is basically pre-compressed, so that even a tensile force just reduces the amount of compression instead of becoming a true tensile load.)

      Basically the press is so enamored with Apple, they ridicule anything different despite it taking advantage of well-known principles of physics and engineering design. (Personally I think a better long-term solution is making phones more flexible, relying on disposable clear plastic display covers to ward off scratches. But Samsung is complying with the current market reality where Apple has convinced the masses who don't know anything about structural engineering that a stiff metal phone is best, by designing an even stiffer phone.)
    • Are curved phone displays really needed or useful? I don't see any benefit. Maybe a phone that fits better in your rear pants pocket, but that's about it.

      Apple is listening to the call of the fans of went out of their way to bend earlier models. Well now they won't have to.

    • Yes, it's useful: this phone comes pre-bent #bendgate
    • No they are not. Also, the quoted "analyst" [Ming-Chi Kuo] is wrong far more often than not, so I have no idea why people continue to post and repost their articles.

  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday March 27, 2016 @12:16PM (#51787075)

    The iPhone 7 is so curved -

    * It doubles as a VR headset with optional strap
    * You can place it directly on your tire to measure tread wear
    * Place it facing the sun and you can cook bacon from the concentrated solar rays in the center
    * Buy two, put them together and you have an awesome 70's style chunky bracelet.
    * Floats on curved surface, feel free to use as bathtime play toy!

  • So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Sunday March 27, 2016 @12:18PM (#51787083) Journal

    The biggest features are something that other phones have had for years?

    • Re:So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Sunday March 27, 2016 @12:39PM (#51787199) Journal

      Other phones don't exist. If the next iphone has curved glass and an amoled display, it's new and innovative. Get with the program. And get in line outside the store. It opens in four hours.

    • Sometimes Apple takes old features and improves them dramatically, so they're big features. I don't see this happening with curves, though. Apple might introduce a curved iPhone, but they're not going to make it a major marketing point.

  • remember kids... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ooloorie ( 4394035 ) on Sunday March 27, 2016 @12:27PM (#51787139)
    When Samsung does something, it's a gimmick. When Apple does the same thing a couple of years later, it's a "wild new feature", "spectacular", and "highly innovative".

    Also, don't forget: nobody would ever want a 5"+ phone or a pen with their tablet; what a silly idea!

    • It doesn't matter. It's different when Apple does it.

      (I don't understand it either...)

    • Also, nobody wants a keyboard in a device they use for text messages.
      • by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Sunday March 27, 2016 @01:11PM (#51787351) Journal

        If keyboards on phones were as important as some make them out to be, Blackberry would be selling millions of units a year.

        • by Lumpy ( 12016 )

          Except that blackberry has no apps, the OS and UI sucks and they tell their users to "go fuck themselves" when they ask for improvements.

          • by narcc ( 412956 )

            Except that blackberry has no apps

            It was a bit slim, though they now users have access to pretty much everything on Amazon's app store. It's a huge improvement.

            the OS and UI sucks

            That's strange. I've heard nothing but praise for the UI -- and it is well ahead of iOS and Android. It's been compared many times to WebOS, which they stole from heavily, making for a very positive user experience. (WebOS, as you know, is still highly praised for its UI.) As for the OS proper, it's QNX, which I've never heard anyone criticize. It used to be quite the darling in

        • If keyboards on phones were as important as some make them out to be, Blackberry would be selling millions of units a year.

          Blackberry? Wasn't the keyboard (in addition to touch) supposed to make Android so much better than iPhone?

    • by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Sunday March 27, 2016 @02:24PM (#51787707) Homepage

      When Samsung does something, it's a gimmick. When Apple does the same thing a couple of years later, it's a "wild new feature", "spectacular", and "highly innovative".

      To be fair, the quality of the implementation is important. The same basic feature can be either gimmicky or useful depending on what it's used for and how it's implemented. Sometimes the innovation is in figuring out how to make the gimmick work.

      • True. Android got there with fingerprint scanners first. But they were 1-dimensional scanners that you had to drag your finger across. A 2d scanner that registers the fingerprint more or less instantly is far better.

      • The same basic feature can be either gimmicky or useful depending on what it's used for and how it's implemented. Sometimes the innovation is in figuring out how to make the gimmick work.

        Usually the innovation is about marketing and hot air, or the predisposition and the biases of the reviewers. You know like copy / paste, notification panels and those other features taken almost verbatim which suddenly became less gimmicky, or the fact that for years people have been using gimmicky pens and they were gimmicky because of a problem no one realised they had until Apple marketing came up with excuses for why they were late to the party.

        • I'm not saying that Apple stuff isn't sometimes overhyped. But for example, the thing about not wanting pens-- I think that's fair to say that tablets and smartphones needed to move away from the stylus. Apple was right about that. The idea of having a little stylus you have to pull out to navigate your tablet or smartphone was just a poor implementation. There's a time and place for a stylus, specifically when you want to draw rather than just navigate the UI.

          So I don't necessarily know what you're ha

    • by Mcgreag ( 957526 )

      I used to own a phone with a curved display (an Nexus S), it is a gimmick. After the first few days you don't even notice it anymore. Nither from a good or bad perspective.

    • Because there's absolutely no difference between:

      you MUST use a stylus for every single operation, and it's a useless device if you lose / break the stylus (where we were in 2006, pre-iPhone)

        - and -

      you MAY use a stylus if you want to, for drawing, handwriting, etc. (where every device is today)

      • you MUST use a stylus for every single operation, and it's a useless device if you lose / break the stylus (where we were in 2006, pre-iPhone)

        Bullshit.

  • Which orientation does it optimize, portrait or landscape? One or the other will suffer with a curved display.
    • Depends on how it's curved. I suspect something like what Samsung has been doing with the Edge.

  • i my iphone was curved before it was cool. [theguardian.com] ;)

  • BGR is ALWAYS filled with sensationalist Apple click bait. I don't know anything about appleinsider.com though and the reported analyst. Are they trustworthy?
    • That "analyst" is wrong far more often than not. Anything from Ming-Chi Kuo can be immediately discounted as "may appear someday, but probably won't."

  • Are they still going to have the interface that looks like my Grandpa's Windows 95 desktop? I can't help but giggle every time I see somebody using one of those things.
  • How exciting...

    for for Iphone/Apple hypers/addicts..

    at least some substance to life obtainable here.

  • Since Apple sued Samsung for using curved edges.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I'm waiting for those phones to start packing better DACs and ports but it looks like they're heading the other way instead. Amazing what's integrated on them phone SoCs but how the analog audio is still barely on par with any old MP3 player (that is, without buying a seperate digital-to-analog converter to schlep around).

      And yes, lighter and thinner does not sound comfortable for my kinda paws. I already tend to get my wig twisted when holding and typing one-handed, what with that slick glass lacking any

    • Apple is now selling phones they expect their customers to keep for a year and then return to them (the "iPhone Upgrade Program"). They made all sorts of little tweaks to the 6S to increase their resale value so that Apple isn't left with a huge stack of unsellable used phones. I think it's unlikely that you'll see delicate iPhones unless they end that program.

      However, it seems like curved glass would be unusable in a case that protects the screen from cracking. I don't use a case for my iPhone, but many, m
  • My current phone has a micro sd slot as did the one before that and the one before that and the one before that....

    Which iPhone model has a micro sd slot?

    • My iPhone has 128GB. Why do I need an SD?

      If you'r buying an Android with 8GB, I can see why you'd need one.

      • Because charging 10 times the price of a similar sized Micro SD card is a rip off.

        • The SD Card would be slower and less secure.

          Price is irrelevant. People buy iPhones because of their quality, not because they are cheap. Sure, if you want a cheap and nasty phone, buy an Android.

          • People buy Apple for fashion reasons. The quality isn't any better than the high end phones from other manufacturers.

            • That's the mistake every idiot Android fan makes. Apple is ALWAYS top of the customer satisfaction surveys. People buy iPhones because they are better. Not because Androids are unfashionable.

              • I'm not an Android fan. I've got an iPhone, an iMac and an iPad as well as an old Note 2 and a Nexus 7 2013 (and a Windows laptop and a Linux netbook - I'm an anti-fanboy). I had a Nexus 6 before my iPhone and I can't tell the difference. Unlike you, Mr Apple Fanboy, I'm not in denial about the kind of company Apple is. I'm aware that all the Android companies are nearly as bad, especially Google who also believe in ripping people off for storage, albeit not as much as Apple do. I have an iPhone becaus

                • Which is a completely different story to what you said in your last post: that people buy iPhones for fashion reasons.

                  • People don't queue outside Apple stores for a week for something they can order online and get the same day just because it's good quality. It's a fashion accessory first and a smartphone second. Just because some people buy them for different reasons doesn't alter that fact. I bought my iMac because I liked the way it looked. I could've bought a far better ugly Windows box that I could've upgraded and repaired with ease but I didn't because I wanted something that looked good.

            • People buy Apple for fashion reasons. The quality isn't any better than the high end phones from other manufacturers.

              I couldn't care less about "fashion".

              I bought an iPhone for iOS. Android is the primary reason I left the Galaxy line of phones. It works fine for awhile, then it doesn't over time. It needs to be wiped from time to time, and frankly after several generations of Android phones (I've owned 4 of them), I went with Apple because "it just works".

              I've now had my iPhone for over a year, it is as fast today as it was when I got it, it works every time without any issues.

              "Fashion"? Ha! Couldn't care less.

              "It j

      • by sims 2 ( 994794 )

        Storage is like closet space you allways find out later that you needed just a bit more.

        Upgrading storage on an iPhone is likewise like closet space you want more space? You buy another house...

        • I haven't used a quarter yet. Give me a legitimate reason for needing more than 128 feature length films or equivalent on a phone.

          • A large collection of music in multiple genres at bitrate from 192 to 256 kbps takes a fair share of that. Storing and playing music on computers was a fairly mundane thing 12 years ago. The individual data is small enough to be workable even if the storage is horribly slow, or through DSL upload, or through USB1. (or even Bluetooth)
            There used to be a handheld media player with a friggin'g hard drive in it, made by a big firm. What was it already? :)

            • A large collection of music in multiple genres at bitrate from 192 to 256 kbps takes a fair share of that.

              128GB is about 150 days worth of 256kbps audio. If you were playing audio 24/7, even when you were asleep.

              And people that want (certainly not need) that kind of access to music are subscribed to Spotify anyway.

              Again, there's no reasonable requirement for a phone larger than 128GB.

              • hum, 256kbps audio is 32 KB per second. 128 GB is 4 million times that, so 4 million seconds, which divided by 86400 gives 46.3 days of audio.
                Sounds like a scary big number but it gets about possible to listen to all of it in a year.
                It's also 1111 hours of audio, which would amount to well over a thousand CDs. Now let's imagine all music is spread perfectly evenly between 20 genres. That's 55.5 hours of music per genre. So let's say you have 55 hours of rock music, they might be spread along only 20+ artist

      • So you can pay $0.27/GB for flash storage instead of $1.79/GB.
    • Which iPhone model has a micro sd slot?

      Apple does not concern itself with such gimmicks as curved scree... please wait a moment. ...
      what? ...
      2017? ...
      really? .... okay got it, I'll update it.

      Apple does not concern itself with gimmicks such as micro SD slots. We innovate truly amazing features like curved screens.
      - Sincerely the Apple marketing department.

    • by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

      With any luck, you will fumble the sd card the next time you try to insert it, and manage to yawn at the same time, causing the card to enter your trachea, where it will be stuck until you choke to death.

      A shame we won't be so lucky.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • A 256GB (or higher) option would be nice, or god forbid a memory card slot.

  • On monitors, in theaters (Arclight's dome in HollyWEIRD), and smartphones (e.g., Samsung Galaxy S6 edge). Am I the only one who hates them? :(

  • In the last "new" release Apple succumbed to the pressure brought on it by Donald Trump to make it small enough to fit in his hand. Will they stick to the slightly smaller than large size going forward? Or are they going to make the phone bigger?
  • Phone have more than topped out in high end hardware needs and have way surpased developers ability to keep apps updated with Google constant core OS changes. Cheap devices are the future.. just like we saw in desktops and laptops which are now basically disposable.. but this market is much higher volume and faster moving. High end phone makers are all going to eat it and be forced to bring costs down because giant phones are stupid..curved phones are stupid.. phones that can plan Crysis are stupid.. espec
  • Looking forward to seeing the iPhone 7 with this new "AMOLED" display they are talking about.

    It might prompt me to update my Samsung Galaxy S4, which must have an inferior screen given its such an old phone.
  • AMOLED displays recently became less expensive than LCD displays: http://www.androidauthority.co... [androidauthority.com] Given that, and especially given the fact that they are lighter and thinner (always priorities at Apple), a switch seems inevitable. One difference we are likely to see from the competition is that Apple's displays will be tuned for color accuracy rather than impact; they will probably look less vibrant than the displays on Samsung phones but will display colors more faithfully.

Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel

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