Apple is going to ship a new iPhone this year and it’s going to run iOS 6. That’s pretty much all we know with 100% certainty. How large will the screen be? What chip will it have inside? Will it support NFC? Will it support 4G LTE? Will the back of the device still be as fragile as the back of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S? Those questions are going to be answered in late September or early October when Tim Cook gets up on stage and starts his 90 minute presentation that’s going to be live blogged by hundreds of journalists, each banging away on what’s likely a MacBook Air. Anyway, today’s news about the next iPhone comes courtesy of The Wall Street Journal. They say that the next iPhone will have a thinner screen because it uses something called “in-cell” technology. Apple will probably rebrand “in-cell” and call it “Magic Good Touch” or something to that effect.
So what the hell is “in-cell” all about? Instead of making a screen touch enabled by putting a capacitive layer on top of a display layer, with “in-cell” you basically integrate the capacitive layer into the actual display itself. Now this isn’t anything new. Samsung was the first to do this when they introduced the original Galaxy S in early 2010. Their fancy pants name for “in-cell” is “Super AMOLED”. One year later Samsung introduced “Super AMOLED Plus” with the Galaxy S II, which is basically the same thing, but minus the PenTile subpixel configuration. And what about this year, what screen technology did Samsung introduce for 2012? That’s an easy one, just look at the Samsung Galaxy S III, which has a “Super AMOLED HD” display. Any guesses as to what Samsung is going to introduce in 2013? Probably something called “Super AMOLED HD Plus”.
Anyway, millions of words will be written about the next iPhone. Just you wait.
