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