ISLAMABAD – The next iPhone is ‘just’ about five months away.A report says that the company is working on a curved screen and touchlesscontrols.
Bloomberg on Wednesday said that these features are apparently in theworks, quoting people familiar with the matter.
The touchless gestures would allow a user to perform certain tasks bymoving a finger close to the display, but not actually touching it – akinto the Air Gesture controls first seen in the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the onefound in the Note series’ S Pen stylus.
A Google unit is also moving forward with a similar technology codenamed’Project Soli’.
The purported curved screen, meanwhile, is said to be similar to the firstdevice to have such a feature – 2013’s Samsung Galaxy Round, which had adisplay that curved inwards toward its centre. This feature, though, wentmainstream when the South Korean company launched the Galaxy Note Edge in2014, which had a curved edge on the right. The next year, the Galaxy Edgeand Edge+ had curved screens on both sides.
However, don’t get too excited about all these: Apple is still in the earlystages of research and it may take 2 or 3 years before they actually rollit out – and scrapping it altogether is also a possibility.
It’s no secret that Apple isn’t the first to offer many innovations. In itslatest iPhone X, however, Apple was able to one-up its rivals with the3D-mapping FaceID and Animoji – though Samsung fired back with its ownIntelligent Scan and AR Emoji, respectively, with its recently-launchedGalaxy S9.