New iPhone 8 Leak Reveals Apple's Boring Breakthrough - http://bit.ly/2k35ICm
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This year's flagship smartphone from Apple is expected to introduce a number of new technologies. The 10th anniversary iPhone model will likely see a new design and new features announced in September. The biggest visual change will be a curved screen that uses OLED technology for the first time in an iPhone. There's just one problem with this. The iPhone 8's competition will have the same screen technology, and in some cases will have put it on sale five months before Apple.
Although Apple's iPhone stands out from a crowded field of smartphones in part down to the exclusive use of iOS as the software platform, much of the technology that the mobile OS leverages can be found "off the shelf" in the supply chains. Memory chips, I/O devices, accelerometers, camera hardware, antennae and many more elements are common across the world's smartphones.
Apple is in a strong position in terms of processors as it designs its own chips, but these still require fabrication in the same factories the handle the order books of rival manufacturers.
And then there is the display, Apple is expected to move to an OLED display for this year's flagship release. OLED offers a number of advantages over Apple's current use of LCD, such as brighter and vivid colors, better contrasts and blacks and reduced power usage. No doubt Apple will wax lyrical about the new screen come the expected launch in September, but as highlighted by DisplayMate's Dr Raymond Soneira, the iPhone's screen will be familiar to many in the industry.
Because of the volume of screens required by Apple, the expectation is that Apple will use one of the existing suppliers of OLED technology to outfit the tens of millions of handsets it will be hoping to sell. Which means that the iPhone 8's underlying visual technology is going to be rather familiar to the competition. Along with Apple, both the Galaxy S8 and Google's follow-up to the Pixel are expected to share the same components from Samsung Display. The presumptively titled Pixel 2 will likely arrive the month after the iPhone 8, but the Galaxy S8 with its curved OLED screen should be on sale in April this year, nearly five months before the iPhone 8.