Apple supplier Japan Display is considering seeking a possible capital injection from strategic investors and buyout funds to help finance a shift from its ailing LCD smartphone business to OLED technology, widely believed to be adopted by Apple's premium iPhone 8 model.
A new free jailbreak tweak dubbed WakeTunes by iOS developer Youssef Mikhail temporarily wakes your iPhone’s screen every time a song changes on your device.
If you’re like me and you listen to music while your iPhone sits in a dock, then this tweak quickly becomes a welcomed addition to the music listening experience.
The Apple-designed A8 chip powering HomePod, Apple's $349 Siri-powered wireless speaker launching this December, should come outfitted with one gigabyte of RAM while its built-in LED matrix display at the top should potentially sport a resolution of 272 by 340 pixels.
Apple will use advanced organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels in all new iPhones launched from the second half of 2018, according to industry sources cited in a report Thursday by Japanese outlet Nikkei.
An industry source added that the Californian company is “tentatively looking” at releasing three new iPhones next year, adding Apple has already started to design the upcoming models.
Apple's plans are contingent upon suppliers' ability to churn out OLED panels in volume.
Because of that, the company could change its plans down the road. Sources in the OLED production equipment industry suggested that vendors may be unable to manufacture enough OLED panels to meet demand should Apple in fact go with OLEDs across 2018 iPhones.
An unnamed Sharp executive was quoted in the story as saying that “it was not likely” Apple will be using OLED screens for all new iPhones next year.
Here's a recent video of a CNC-machined iPhone 8 dummy based on the rumor-mill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW1gx086ZxU
This year, as you know, Apple is widely expected to outfit iPhone 8 with an OLED-based screen.
The flagship device is expected to sport the highest screen-to-body ratio, ditch the physical Home button and reduce or completely eliminate the top and bottom chin.
Yuanta Investment Consulting said shipments of 2017 iPhones will reach 90 million handsets, half of which will be OLED models.
As for the iterative iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus updates coming down the pike this year, these devices will continue to sport LCD screens like prior iPhone models.
Nikkei added that the iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus models will be sold into early 2019. In other words, panel vendors will still be able to supply LCDs for older Apple handsets next year and well into 2019.
Since iOS 7.1, Apple's mobile operating system has included a feature that allows you to manually adjust the display's white point to your liking. A white point, also known as reference white or target white, defines the color white in reproduction.
Lowering the white point makes bright colors on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch's screen more intense. Conversely, increasing the white point reduces the intensity of bright colors, thereby helping extend the run time of your iPhone or iPad.
The ability to manually adjust the white point so that it matches a white surface in your room is particularly handy for owners of devices that lack Apple's True Tone display technology.
How to adjust the intensity of bright colors on iPhone and iPad1) Launch the Settings app on your device.
2) Tap Accessibility.
3) Tap Display & Text Size underneath the Vision heading.
4) Slide the button labeled Reduce White Point to the ON position.
5) Now drag the slider underneath the button to the right to make bright colors less intense or move it to the left to lower the white point, which will make bright colors more intense.
Reducing the intensity of the screen's battery-hogging backlight by increasing the white point is one of the nearly dozen proven ways to save battery life on iPhone and iPad.
TIP: To get to this feature faster, set it as a triple-click Home button action in Settings → General → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut.
Again, don't confuse Reduce White Point with the True Tone feature.
True Tone ≠ Reduce White PointWhat exactly is the difference between True Tone and Reduce White Point?
True Tone is Apple's display technology currently found on iPad Pro models which changes the white point of the display on the fly while simultaneously adjusting brightness in order to compensate for the lighting in the environment
The Reduce White Point option does not take advantage of the ambient light sensors in your device like True Tone does. As a result, you cannot tell your device to adjust the white point of its display dynamically to match the current lighting conditions in a room.
Put simply, should lighting conditions change you'll need to repeat these steps to manually recalibrate the intensity of bright colors for the current ambient lighting.
Have you ever wanted to set the screen brightness on your iOS device below the normal threshold? If so, the Low Light filter in your Zoom accessibility settings is your friend.
Need help? Ask iDB!If you like this how-to, pass it along to your support folks and leave a comment below.
Got stuck? Not sure how to do certain things on your Apple device? Let us know via help@iDownloadBlog.com and a future tutorial might provide a solution.
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Last night, prolific smartphone leakster Benjamin Geskin published an image on his Twitter, reportedly obtained from a Foxconn source, which he claims represents a screen frame holding the iPhone 8's OLED display and rumored glass sandwich design together.
The leaked screen bracket lacks any Home button placement because iPhone 8 is widely expected to adopt a virtual Home button in a so-called function area at the screen bottom.
The presumed iPhone 8 part has a large circular cutout at the top.
The cutout could house additional ambient light sensors to make the OLED display of iPhone 8 True Tone-capable or it could be for a rumored 3D sensor for advanced facial recognition, improved selfie quality, 3D mapping and other features.
According to KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, iPhone 8 will feature “the highest screen-to-body ratio of any smartphone currently available worldwide” and no in-screen Touch ID.
Corners just don't look right to me—they're too rounded and radius is too small, looking more like Samsung than Apple design. I think this is a Note 8 bracket, but that's just me.
Feel free to share your own observations in the comments section below.
Samsung is planning to build the world's biggest OLED display manufacturing plant that could kick off volume production in 2019, with a peak yield of between 180,000 and 270,000 OLED display panels per month, according to industry sources.
By comparison, the company's existing “A2” factory currently produces 180,000 units of rigid and flexible OLEDs per month.
Samsung Display, the South Korean conglomerate's display-making arm, will invest more than $1.75 billion just to construct the new plant. The report is relevant to our readers because Samsung Display is believed to be an exclusive provider of OLED panels for iPhone 8.
When operational, the company's new OLED factory, tentatively named “A5”, should have 30 percent higher production capacity than Samsung current biggest factory called “A3”, according to Korean outlet ETNews.
The site added that Samsung began expanding capacity of its upcoming “A3” factory during the second half of 2015 in order to meet Apple's order for a large amount of OLED panels.
According to the report, Samsung Display has secured production capacity of 135,000 OLED panels per month over the next two years, primarily to serve the needs of its two biggest clients: Apple and Samsung Electronics.
iPhone 8 Full Vision Display concept courtesy of iFanr.
iPhone 8 production has allegedly hit another roadblock, with a sketchy report Tuesday by Taiwanese outlet DigiTimes suggesting the supposedly limited availability of 5.8-inch OLED display panels could hold back the phone's launch sales.
Citing industry sources, the trade publication says it'll be difficult for Apple to ship up to 60 million OLED-based iPhones in 2017.
“Only 3-4 million OLED-based new iPhone devices will be ready for shipping before the new smartphones are unveiled at a product event slated for September,” reads the article.
The publication did not give the reason for the allegedly limited OLED screen availability beyond stating that yield rates at assembly plants and the supply of OLED panels are “likely to become issues” for the Cupertino firm.
Take the report with a few grains of salt because Samsung Display recently negotiated a lucrative supply deal with Apple to build at least 80 million OLED panels for iPhone 8 in 2017.
In fact, the South Korean conglomerate is said to be supplying OLED screens for both iPhone 9 in 2018 and a yet-to-be-disclosed Apple device with a screen measuring 6.5 inches diagonally, as per The Korea Herald.
Besides, iPhone assemblers Foxconn, Pegatron and Wistron have been stepping up efforts to recruit more workers for their assembly lines in China, indicating that volume production of iPhone 8 is about to kick off.
On top of that, Apple's key chip supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company saw its revenues surge twenty percent sequentially in May, partly driven by shipments of iPhone 8's A11 processors to Apple.
iPhone 8 mockup top of post via Benjamin Geskin
Smartphone leakster Benjamin Geskin today tweeted out a few images and a video of an alleged tempered glass screen protector for Apple's OLED-based 5.8-inch iPhone 8.
First posted on Chinese social network Weibo and originally re-posted on SlashLeaks, it has noticeably thin bezels and a minor cutout at the top for the camera and the sensors.
As evidenced by the images, the accessory matches up the rumored dimensions and design schematics of iPhone 8 perfectly. It should be said that vendors often design accessories for unreleased Apple products based on rumors, so take this one with a grain of salt.
The screen protector is made by Olixar and can be purchased via MobileFun for $32.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khCLSSpTpto
According to the product's listing, the accessory features edge-to-edge design with a 2.5D rounded edge and includes support for Apple's 3D Touch pressure-sensing technology.
Whether you're coming to the iPhone from the Samsung world or you just like the look and feel of Samsung’s latest smartphone displays, a new free jailbreak tweak called S8Edge by iOS developer Bruno Andrade helps you feel right at home by simulating the Samsung S8 Infinity display on your flat-screened iPhone.
The tweak accomplishes its task by rounding the corners of everything displayed on your screen and adding a darkened gradient to both side edges of your screen that help reproduce the look and feel of the Samsung S8 Infinity display when looking at it head-on.
Samsung showed off a prototype of its stretchable 4K AMOLED display with glasses-free 3D, measuring 9.1 inches diagonally, at last week's Display Week 2017 conference. Today, Samsung Display's official YouTube channel shared a video of the stretchable display in action.
Samsung has been making flexible AMOLED panels for its flagship Galaxy phones for a few years now, but this new display has the elasticity to bend in two directions. The video shows the prototype AMOLED panel as having up to 12mm of travel before returning to its original shape, without any image degradation when pressed.
Here's the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EMBTHbkXnE
Samsung says the next-generation tech might one day be used for wearable devices and more.
“Compared to conventional flexible OLEDs that can be formed in only one direction, such as bending, folding, or rolling a screen, the Samsung Display stretchable AMOLED panel can be flexed in two directions,” explains Samsung Display.
“When the screen is pressed from above, it depresses like a rubber balloon, then returns to its original flat shape. The screen when stretched up or down, even when pressed, has sufficient elasticity to recover.”
Apple is said to be making a major switch from the traditional LCD panels to the more energy-efficient AMOLED display technology with iPhone 8, but the move is said to be short-lived: the Cupertino giant has been researching even more power efficient micro-LED screens, based on its 2014 acquisition of micro-LED experts LexVue.
The iPhone maker could kick off trial production of its next-generation micro-LED display panels by the end of this year, according to supply chain reports, meaning this technology most likely won't debut before iPhone 9 in 2018 although Apple Watch Series 3 could debut this year with a micro-LED display.
Apple is expected to change iPhone's screen aspect ratio from 16:9 on iPhone 7 to 18:9 on iPhone 8, according to multiple reports. Economic Daily News said today that the device's screen ratio will change to 18.5:9 instead of the previous 16:9.
18.5:9 accounts for the rumored curvature of iPhone 8's OLED display: the phone's active display area is understood to be 5.1 or 5.2 inches in the precise 18:9 aspect ratio.
Yesterday, DigiTimes said that Apple is expected to unveil a new iPhone in the second half of 2017, equipped with a 5.8-inch AMOLED panel in the—you guessed right—18:9 aspect ratio.
Aspect ratio is the relationship between the height and width of a display. In simpler terms, a 16:9 screen has 16 pixels in one direction for every 9 pixels in the other. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, popularized by older TVs, and 16:9 found on widescreen ones.
18:9 has been popularized by the latest phones from Samsung and LG, which have screens that are taller than the 16:9 ratio used by the majority of smartphones.
Already, these new phones have prompted panel vendors to expand capacity to meet fast-growing demand for 18:9 smartphone displays.
It looks like the 18:9 screen aspect ratio is here to stay, but what's so special about it?
Mockup of iPhone 8 with Full Vision Display, via iFanr.
For starters, the 18:9 screen aspect ratio (you could just call it a 2:1 display) results in a display that's a little bit taller than a typical 16:9 screen. As a result, an 18:9 phone may provide a better grip than its 16:9 counterpart.
As a bonus, 18:9 is perfectly suited for Split View multitasking that Apple is expected to bring to iPhone with iOS 11. More importantly, on an 18:9 screen you can have one app on top of another in portrait mode. In the Camera app, as an example, you might be able to take a square photo on half of the screen and review it on the other half.
18:9 screens also show more content vertically so users see more of a webpage in Safari, additional images in their Instagram feed, more tweets and so forth, without scrolling.
On the downside, a majority of HD videos today are encoded in the 16:9 format and many games and apps are optimized for 16:9 on a landscape mode. If iPhone 8 will really come outfitted with an 18:9 display, all 16:9 videos will show blank space on the sides of the phone.
As Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica noted in his review of Galaxy S8, the device's unusual aspect ratio results in pillarboxing when watching 16:9 video without zooming or stretching it.
What's the point of having thin bezels on a phone if your 16:9 movie-watching experience suffers from blank space on the sides, you might be asking. While this is no doubt concerning, you can always double-tap to prompt iOS's media player to zoom in the video so that it fills the entire screen, in which case parts of the video would get cropped out.
Still, 18:9 could gain momentum if filmmakers adopt it.
iPhone 8 concept courtesy of designer Gábor Balogh.
For what it's worth, select new shows on Amazon Video and Netflix are shot in 18:9. Plus, Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro is pushing the new Univisum 2:1 format (or 18:9) versus the typically wider 2.20:1 aspect ratio commonly used in movie theaters nowadays.
It's unclear, and this is important, if iPhone 8's upgraded camera will feature a new aspect ratio that's closer to 18:9. Take Galaxy S8's 12-megapixel camera which shoots in 4:3 by default. But start shooting in the 18.5:9 mode and you only get 7.9-megapixel of its capabilities.
In the same vein, LG G6's thirteen-megapixel camera offers a maximum of 8.7-megapixel capability in 18.5:9 mode, or 9.7 megapixels for 16:9 images. Only 4:3 images can be shot in the full 13-megapixel resolution.
On the other hand, as iPhone 8 is said to include an active screen area at the display's bottom potentially designed for showing persistent on-screen controls, like Android, it's entirely conceivably that the actual content area could be in the 16:9 aspect ratio.
Apps are likely going to need to be updated to take the full advantage of the 18:9 canvas, but having been there before we expect a relatively painless transition. Be that as it may, Apple certainly is no stranger to making an iPhone's screen taller.
Claimed iPhone 8 case (middle) next to iPhone 7 (left) and iPhone 7 Plus case (right).
With 2012's iPhone 5, Apple made the display a tad taller without making it wider so that users could still reach corners at the top in one-handed mode. It took developers several months to update their apps to take full advantage of the new screen format. It follows that existing apps on an 18:9 iPhone would show black bars on the top and bottom of the screen.
At any rate, Google has urged developers to work with newer 18:9 aspect ratios for their apps and Apple is expected to do the same if iPhone 8 adopts the new screen format.
In other words, expect 18:9 to quickly become the new norm for smartphones.
As we reported before, iPhone 8 should manage to squeeze a 5.8-inch AMOLED panel (with an active display area measuring 5.1 inches) inside a chassis that would be just a little bit wider and a tad taller than the existing 4.7-inch iPhones.
Hopefully, Apple will achieve this by drastically reducing or eliminating the bezels and integrating the Home button, Touch ID, the camera and sensors into the display assembly.
Fun fact: the original iPhone had a screen aspect ratio of 3:2.
iPhone 8 mockup top of post via Benjamin Geskin.