Concept: bezel-less iPhone 8 with wraparound AMOLED screen and Dark Mode

Following a concept video from Polish blog My Apple imagining what a system-wide Dark Mode in iOS 11 (along with a few other sought-after rumored features) might look like, user interface designer Vianney le Masne has taken it upon himself to put together some great-looking mockups depicting how iPhone 8’s rumored OLED screen and the handset’s bezel-less design could be leveraged to implement Dark Mode across iOS and in apps.

“With Dark Mode in iOS for the next iPhone, 2017 could be all about killing the four sides of your screen and making it all about your thumb,” said le Masne.

Rumored Dark Mode would be much more than just inverting white and black pixels.

“Going dark will massively smoothen contrast between the edge of the screen and the bezel. In fact it will be indistinguishable as the OLED empowered pixels will not emit any light, which regular screens do,” he wrote.

As a result, app designers will need to adapt their workflow as they’ll be potentially working from the centre of a dark slate towards full black rather than start from a blank artboard in Sketch and work their way down from top left to bottom right.

iPhone 8’s rumored function area at the bottom should be great for thumb-centred designs that are “more about the user completing a core action and less about a user using a rectangular piece of technology.”

Another concept has imagined what the function area might be like.

If Apple actually introduces a dark user interface theme in iOS 11, classic layouts of iPhone apps will of course need to be reworked for Dark Mode in oder not to feel out of place, the designer cautioned.

“The potential contained behind dark mode is much bigger than what it’s name might suggest,” le Masne said. If you’d like to create iPhone 8 and iOS 11 mockups yourself, be sure to download Apple’s Sketch and Photoshop templates for iOS 10 development.

Check out a few more mockups highlighting how iPhone 8’s OLED-based borderless experience and iOS 11’s Dark Mode could dramatically advance iOS’s look and feel.

And here’s the concept video with all the mockups he’s created.

A display based on OLEDs would yield a bunch of nice benefits.

Because OLEDs illuminate the individual pixels and don’t require a power-hungry backlight module, an OLED-based iPhone would have the following advantages versus existing iPhones outfitted with the traditional liquid crystal panels:

  • Higher resolution
  • Lower power consumption
  • Sharper images
  • Thinner and lighter display assembly
  • Better color accuracy
  • Better visibility under direct sunlight
  • Deeper blacks
  • Better color saturation
  • Better viewing angles
  • Higher peak brightness

As we noted today, some experts—including DisplayMate’s Raymond Soneira and IHS Markit analyst Wayne Lam—think that Apple might end up using a flat rather than a curved screen for iPhone 8 due to lower manufacturing costs and better yields.

Source: Vianney le Masne