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Apple Developing Curve Screen iPhones and Improved Sensors
An anonymous reader writes "An Apple insider who asked not to be identified because the information is classified told Bloomberg that Apple's next iPhone models will come with curve displays and enhanced touchscreen sensors that can detect heavy and light touches. The two models -- 4.7-inches and 5.5-inches -- would be Apple's largest iPhones. Apple is still developing the two models and the person disclosed that Apple could launch the devices in the third quarter of next year."
Is this for anti glare or something?
No, I think it is to extract more money from wallets.
Still with an OS that lacks features that have become standard in other platforms, still with sucky app management, still with a lack of control for a device you won.....all for twice the price of an equivalent Nexus phone.
No thanks. A phone where I can't install a browser of my choice(not just a reskin), download torrents on, use widgets(yes, they greatly increase productivity) on or not have every damn app as an icon on a home screen isn't much use to me.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
At last! It's nice to see Apple innovating and taking the lead again.
As explained in the following link:
http://www.livescience.com/39371-skyscraper-melts-cars-20-fenchurch.html
To fit in a pocket around the leg better?
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Is this for anti glare or something?
It seems to be a mixture of 'pointless novelty for its own sake' and 'human legs are roughly cylindrical, so slightly curved objects fit better in pockets that would otherwise be a bit small'.
Apple is not developing large screen phones with curved displays, they are inventing large screen phones with curved displays.
Given that capacitive touchscreens are typically intended to be used with input devices (fingers or those ghastly little rubber stylus-things) that deform under pressure, is there something stopping you from computing approximate pressure by examining the size of the area of contact across the duration of the touch? A light touch would presumably be of nearly constant size, with little or no deformation of the user's finger, a heavy touch would have substantially greater surface area at its peak (when the user's finger is deformed against the rigid glass) than during the beginning or end of the touch.
Are current capacitive touchscreens not high resolution enough for that? Not a high enough refresh rate? Human-meat too unpredictable in deform-ability between subjects?
Is this for anti glare or something?
No, I think it is to extract more money from wallets.
Aside from novelty, the point of a curved display is to squeeze more screen area into the same footprint.
I've never understood curved TVs, but I can see the appeal of curved phones which need to fit comfortably into palms and pockets.
Yes, I always put my phone in my pocket _sideways_. Because I do this truly bizarre thing, their phones which will curve from top to bottom will totally fit around the _horizontal_ curve of my leg with I put them in my pocket _sideways_.
Hmm.. I feel my sarcasm didn't come across well, I wish I could draw a picture to better illustrate my sarcasm.
There's also geometry - more screen size in a shorter device.
Still with an OS that lacks features that have become standard in other platforms, still with sucky app management, still with a lack of control for a device you won.....all for twice the price of an equivalent Nexus phone.
No thanks. A phone where I can't install a browser of my choice(not just a reskin), download torrents on, use widgets(yes, they greatly increase productivity) on or not have every damn app as an icon on a home screen isn't much use to me.
I just bought a Nexus 5, coming from an iPhone5. I still haven't figured out how to get widgets on my lock screen (apparently, it's *not* just a setting in security - all the JB guides refer to things that KitKat doesn't permit). I sure hope that isn't a feature regression, cause I can get weather on my iOS7 lockscreen (with a drop-slider). Furthermore, during setup/install, I had to enter my wifi password twice (once before update, then after update it forgot all my settings), and it blanked out in an enitre screen. Add to that the fact that the built-in PDF renderer failed on 2 documents I tried to download, and that swiftkey is slow to load, the Chrome location bar is poorly spaced (causing me to wipe out several addresses), and the general confusion about how things are done (there's a search app and the browser app - look and behave similarly but aren't the same).
The bluetooth seems to work better with apps on my Nexus, and the screen real-estate is nice. But ... there are a lot of things that the previous-year iPhone did much better/cleaner than the Nexus does. I'm not going back just yet - but so far it isn't a bed of roses here. Hoping I can sort out some of these expectation misses before I feel forced to send this device back.
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One benefit of squeezing more screen space into the same footprint is that your thumb will have an easier time hitting the edges. It sounds like a pointless technology at first (at least for phones), but it at least has the potential to be useful.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
They heard everyone else was doing it so they wanted to make sure everyone thought it was their idea. Like all the other stuff they come up with (and patent).
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
They are developing smart watches. You hear that, Samsung? SMART WATCHES! Yeah.
Why would you put the phone horizontal? That would be rather uncomfortable.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Is the letter "d" particularly expensive these days?
"...iPhone models will come with curve displays and enhance touchscreen sensors," Why not, "curved displays and enhanced touchscreen sensors"?
I'm not so much a grammar Nazi as someone who believes that if you're going to write something for a large (or even small) audience you should make an effort to write clearly in respect for that audience. I'll probably get the "You jerk, you know what he meant!" response but I stand by my point.
Maybe the curved screen is for the planned iWatch. Apple tends to use tricks so the press and industrial spies don't know accurately what feature will go to which product.
Table-ized A.I.
I just can't see how a curved display is any better than a flat one. It makes the shape of the phone awkward, it becomes unstable on a flat surface unless the back of the phone is flat. In which case the sides are much thicker than needed. To me this is a totally unnecessary gimmick. Next up: Wavy displays, round displays, triangle displays. But Why?!?? Different != Better.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I currently live in Asia (1.5 years in Singapore and now in Hong Kong) and I've seen Android (mainly Samsung) phones getting more and more popular over that period. This is very obvious when observing people in the metro.
From discussions, it is mainly the large screen size that draws many people to these Samsung devices. Leaving out the tiring arguments of fanboys of each camp, non-technical people liked the iphones just fine, sometimes preferring the way it works, but mainly they prefer a bigger screen.
Myself, I prefer a compact phone - I have an iPhone 4S and would love it with 5S guts. But it is obvious that Apple should have been selling bigger phones since a good time already. So, considering that the brand still has goodwill amongst non slashdotty users, I can imagine that they will win back some users with these bigger phones.
Regarding the technical changes. I like the idea of a pressure-level sensitive sensor. I can imagine that a curved screen will look very posh (nothing wrong with that, in fact since a number of years I like buying things that are nicely designed, even if at a premium), but it's to my mind not really a true value add. I do expect that a curved screen will look much more natural on an eventual iWatch.
My first thought is that it would be to prevent screen damage - if the display is curved and you place it face down on a flat surface there will be only two points of contact.
First you need to check that box in security as you saw.
Then at the lock screen sweep from left (all the way left) to right. You'll get to a blank screen with a plus sign on it. Click the plus sign and you can add a widget.Now if you want that to be the default widget instead of one you have to sweep to get to, then you have to sweep back to the main lock screen, click and hold it and drag it to the "remove" item at the top.
The setup/install is screwed, you do have to go through setup at least partially twice due to that update.
The PDF renderer is bizarre and on top of that it interacts with the terrible download UI in bad ways. Frequently my phone will finish the pdf download in the notifications, then show nothing at all, then like 30 seconds later it'll bring a PDF reader to the front (my Nexus 4 did it too). And if you want to view the PDF again later, you have to click the link again, watch it download (not sure it's downloading or just verifying an existing download) before it can be viewed again.
I love how the notifications work compared to the iPhone though. And the keyboard is about 10x better than the iPhone one, using the iPhone one now is like torture to me.
It kills me that there is virtually no help for anything. Try asking the phone questions like "what are those icons up at the top of the screen" (the notifications). You can do so either with the excellent voice search or by typing it, either way it won't give you any answer, it just searches the web. And even if a result comes back from the web, the result isn't keyed to the OS you are running. Back when I was running ICS on my Nexus 4 I would search and get "help" answers that only applied to Gingerbread.
Speaking of notifications, I watched two ladies use their Samsung Galaxies last week, both had notifications lined up all across the top of their screen. They didn't know what a notification was, how to view/answer it or how to make them go away. Really sad.
I do like the Nexus 5 though, better than the Nexus 4 I had before it. And it's a heck of a value. But it still has a ways to go to catch up to the iPhone in usability in many ways.
Now, if I could just get Apple to see what the Nexus 5 does right and copy that. The price. The screen. The keyboard. The ability to use bluetooth (non-4.0) devices without an Apple auth chip installed. The ability to use other mail clients as if they were built-in.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Is this for anti glare or something?
A curve can make glare worse by focusing the light
Nope, this is just some stupid marketing gimmick. They spend years telling us that flat screen TVs are the way to go, now they're making them curved again.
No sig today...
Aside from novelty, the point of a curved display is to squeeze more screen area into the same footprint.
Huh? What are you smoking? I think you should lay off it...
No sig today...
You've hit the nail on the head.
ie. Nobody has a clue what it's for.
No sig today...
Not if you wear sarcasm pants.
No sig today...
How much more, exactly? Have you calculated that before telling the world?
No sig today...
An Apple insider who asked not to be identified because the information is classifiedâ¦
In other words, an unverifiable rumour from an unverifiable source. It appeared first on MacRumors, where it has some justification to appear because it is about rumours. It does not fit under "news for nerds", because it isn't news.
It seems to be the most natural position for it. I put it in vertically, and it ends up horisontally.
And since my legs actually bend in that area, it makes it a lot easier to curl up into a fetal position every time Apple news is "leaked".
Let's get this clear, it's a fucking phone, dammit, not a way of life
It would be a little more believable without all the foaming at the mouth.
Apple has chosen as its trademark a small, flat, long, and narrow rectangle with rounded corners. And Apple made a big deal over this. Apple made their bed, let them sleep in it.
Samsung ended up with the rounded smooth shapes. Samsung should patent the look and feel of phones with curved screens. They could file separate patents for different curvatures.
PS: Let's do the math!
What's the cosine of 5 degrees? That's the new size if you bend a screen by 10 degrees (5 degrees each side of the center line)
My calculator says cos(5) = 0.9962 ... so it's less than 0.5% smaller.
Plus it looks awful: http://www.bloomberg.com/image/ibdaG6emCoQY.jpg
No sig today...
How do you know which way the screen curves? All I see in the article is this:
curves downward at the edges
Which is ambiguous at best.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Is this for anti glare or something?
You can see in this video, the glare is *much* worse.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/29/samsung-galaxy-round-hands-on/
No sig today...
No, I think it is to extract more money from wallets.
Yep. It's a "novelty" - a conversation point.
All it has to do is look weird and people will find ways they think it's "better" to justify it to themselves.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/29/samsung-galaxy-round-hands-on/
The sad thing is: In a few years we'll all have this whether we want it or not, there won't be anything but curved phones in the shops. After that they'll start selling us "classic shape" phones at a premium price. So it goes.
No sig today...
The thing I can think of where you would want the curved screen is a bracelet type device, aka watch or Leela's wristband doohickey
Apple develops many things that never go to market. Inside sources usually give up this information for a chance at being important.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
It's even worse than that. If w is the telephone apparent width, and alpha the bending angle, the screen's true width is
truewidth = alpha * (w/2)/(sin(alpha/2))
For w=2 inches and alpha = 10 degrees, truewidth = 2.00254 ; barely 0.1% better.
Obviously not. He wouldn't have made that "point" if he had.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Hello, you look like a person that would like to choose a phone that suits your needs rather than one that Apple says is best for you.
Luckily, with Android, you can get a both a phone that is curved along the top-bottom axis like the Galaxy Round or a phone that is curved along the left-right axis like the LG G Flex
Naturally flat phones will also be supported in parallel with the curved ones if you should prefer that. (We have yet to see if this will be the case with products running a competing OS.)
Have a nice day, and remember, there is no wrong way to hold a phone.
Is this for anti glare or something?
Actually, with a curved display, there's more probability of glare.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Nobody has a clue what it's for.
Perhaps it is a woman-thing.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Slashdot should implement a sarcasm sign.
I am not really here right now.
I think it's time to create some buzzword-bingo cards for these.
We can mark squares off whenever anybody says "more screen area", "fits better in pocket", etc.
No sig today...
Monitors were actually better...
No sig today...
I don't have my number head on this morning, but if you're referring to foreshortening I was thinking much the same thing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Nah, it doesn't have wings on the side.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The claim is "More screen in the same space!!"
As a mathematician, I'm having trouble understanding what goes on in people's heads when they say things like that. It's so obviously not true.
Whenever I see one I'm going to point out how it increases screen reflectivity and makes it harder to see.
No sig today...
He also said "shorter device" instead of "narrower device", when it's curved *vertically*.
And he did that on a 'nerd' website.
Yep. I think Apple has found their target market. They've run out of new features but this will have people queuing up all night to buy a iPhone6.
No sig today...
Yep. It's very obvious in this video: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/29/samsung-galaxy-round-hands-on/
More glare.
I'm going to enjoy pointing that out to proud owners.
No sig today...
In an emergency you could use it to fry a sausage I guess. : )
I do not think it means what you think it means. Classified documents originate from a classification authority. There is no classification authority within Apple. Classification authorities are within the state and federal government. While Apple is large (and last I heard had more money than the federal reserve), that doesn't mean they can classify documents :)
:)
Now, there can be trade secrets, that's an entirely different thing.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
The next iPhone will have a screen like this ...guaranteed. And it will be awesome.
Uhhuh. Whatever, dude. We're talking about an unsubstantiated rumour here, you know. I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't claim credit for things other people do first. They just make sure people know they did it right.
Nobody has a clue what it's for.
Perhaps it is a woman-thing.
If it's curved and can vibrate, women will find the clue sometime, if only for the geeks around here asking stupid questions when on a date.
I remember curved CRT monitors and TV set. When flat screen CRT appeared was a welcome innovation. Why on phones we have to go back in ergonomy only for the novelty factor? What next? iPhones will be equipped with vertical and horizontal hold knobs and only for US and Japan a Tint Knob?
Yeah. Until you apply some weight, (read: accidentally put something on top of it, or have some moron step on it etc) -- then you have a nice sort-of-lever:)
Likewise, place it on the backside and it will annoy the hell out of everyone whenever you nudge the table
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Hmm, never had that problem with my Galaxy Nexus. Granted, if I'm stupid enough to drop a breeze block on it or leave my phone on the floor for someone to step on, then yes, the very large radius of curvature of the screen may enable the phone to deform. However, odds are that if I stand on my phone it will be damaged regardless.
The funny this is that just because the screen is curved, it doesn't mean the back has to be curved.
I like how everyone takes this rumour as EXTREMELY credible, like this is definitely what we're getting next year. Apple works on lots of stuff. They've probably been working with the ergonomics of curved screens in mockups for years, but who knows?
I like Apple rumours as much as the next guy, but this is clickbait. Nobody knows what Apple will do for their phones next year. They'll be faster, and maybe they'll be bigger. They'll probably have a different design, but I suspect that the design will actually stay more or less the same. They've got a lot invested in their relatively iconic design. You may not like the design of the iPhone, but it's recognisable, and that's important.
The curve will be around the horizontal axis, just like the other curved phones that already exist. Top to bottom curve. Hence "Shorter". They can probably shave a mm or so off of it, but no I didn't whip out my calculator.
Agreed, I don't see the appeal. With larger screens and now curved as well, it will just be extra bulky in your pocket and wobble on your desk/nightstand. OCD people will have a fit every time they put it down, waiting for it to be still.
"So put it down the other way."
"Yeah but I can't see the screen."
Twinstiq, game news
Monitors were actually better...
... and used to be round as well. But curved into the other direction (bulging out towards the reader, rather than in, away from him)
What's a curved display? The article was clear that we're talking about curve displays. Are you retard or something?
Why would you put the phone horizontal? That would be rather uncomfortable.
Maybe, so that it bulges out more?
there is no wrong way to hold a phone.
Of course there is. Upside down, with the speaker next to your mouth, and the mic next to your ear. But you'd still get excellent reception (even though the audio would be shit)
Don't make giant phones and it's not an issue. The 4S fits fine in a back pocket.
A curve can make glare worse by focusing the light
Indeed...
I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this... but am I the only one here who actually likes having a small phone? I guess it's a trade-off. I'm willing to give up the convenience of having the extra screen real estate for having a small phone...
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
So they're finally adding height and width to their touch data. Such innovation. /s
While technically true it'd be much thicker than necessary at the edges if you made the back flat.
I'm assuming, perhaps wrongly, that when they say the screen is curved it's convex from the viewer's POV.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If it was convex from a viewer's POV, then it would be much thicker in the middle, if the back were to be flat
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
i they meant the phone can be longer but curved so that it is the same length/width as a noncurved phone, the problem is just the height or depth is increased which probably isn't that big of a deal. but which way is it curved? like a half-tube, or a bridge?
Apparently math makes people's heads spin even on slashdot.
The point of all those numbers up there was to prove that you'd have to curve it by a ridiculous amount to make a noticeable difference in width/height (eg. more then 1% shorter/narrower) .
No sig today...
The curve will be around the horizontal axis, just like the other curved phones that already exist.
The Pesky Facts are against you I'm afraid.
Plus: Is it worth it to gain 1mm...?
No sig today...
"The two models--4.7-inches and 5.5-inches-- would be Apple largest iPhones"
They are both the largest? It's like Highlander - there can be only one. I see he wrote "Apple", singular, so maybe samzenpus' brain secretly knew this.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
I think I've missed something about the curvature - a lot of people seem to be taking as if it's huge. My thought was that it would be like that of the galaxy nexus, ie the centre of the screen 1mm off-plane. I suppose that's big for iPhones as they have a uniform thickness.
The only people that claim Apple invented anything are Apple Haters who like to claim Apple says that...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The word is curved.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
You sound foolish. It will curve top to bottom, I'll come back to mock you when it's officially announced.
Thanks for pointing that out, it wasn't obvious at all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My low-end Samsung can work in either mode (and the thing for switching between them is both way too sensitive and too slow) so I'd assume more upmarket ones can too?
As to whether it's a gimmick or not, maybe you'll find this amusing: http://slashdot.org/submission/3109229/curved-smartphone-screens-arent-a-gimmick
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Calm down there, Bucky. It's just a phone.
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Not anti-glare. When the screen is curved, you are guaranteed glare no matter how you hold the phone., like asking not to see glare of the curved back window of a sports car.
If that's the case, then there's absolutely zero practical reason for doing it because whatever the effect is, it won't be very much.
Shit, it's not enough to make water run off.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."