iPhone 8 Will Hardly Bring Anything New

Five Reasons iPhone 8 will fail to set any trend

The closer is the date of the iPhone 8 release, the more disappointed I feel about it. Rolling out an anniversary model of the legendary smartphone is a burden as it is. But with the mobiles industry developing rapidly, the task becomes almost impossible.

Let’s have a look what features are most expected in this phone:

5.8-inch OLED display.
Faster A11 processor.
Glass body.
Edge-to-edge display.
Facial Recognition, perhaps replacing Touch ID.
No Home button.
Wireless charging.
Behind-the-screen speakers.

The problem is, most of these features are implemented in other smartphones. The iPhone has always been the state-of-the-art gadget that set up new trends as it happened with the fingerprint reader. But now it seems, the Apple is falling behind.

Let’s begin with the OLED display. OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diodes. OLED screens are brighter, sport better refresh rates and contrast than LCD, but what’s more important – they are thinner and flexible. The screens are also often called AMOLED, as the manufacturers add Active Matrix as the prefix. And the OLED displays have been introduced already in Samsung Galaxy S7 (2016), Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, Samsung Galaxy S8 (2017), Google Pixel (2016). Lenovo has just introduced the foldable tablet with the OLED display that makes this folding possible in the first place. Even Chinese home brands like Xiaomi and Meizu implement the OLED displays in their flagships while the iPhone 7 is still sporting the IPS one.

Edge-to-edge display is nowadays almost a common feature. Again, the Galaxy S8, the LG G6, or the Xiaomi Mi Mix. Of them three only the LG smartphone was released this March, others are last year flagships. But they all are just the runner-ups to the Sharp Aquos Crystal that was rolled out back in 2014!

Facial recognition is used in Windows Hello ID system. This very system takes an IR webcam and considers not only a face’s landmarks, but also a head’s position and can build the representations of the face using the above mentioned landmarks as the anchors. Guess when the Windows Hello facial recognition went to Microsoft mobiles? Early 2017? 2016? No, 2015! It was the time when the Apple designers were probably considering the ditching of a headphones socket. Even the half-forgotten and despised Nokia Lumia featured it in its premium models. Now you can buy the premium HP Elite X3 with the same authentication system aboard. The only drawback of these models is that they didn’t get too much hype the iPhones usually gets.

Wireless charging is not a trending feature either. Samsung has been implementing the technology since Samsung Galaxy s6 line-up. And Sony is now working on a revolutionary technology that will allow to share the charge between two phones wirelessly! I think, I’ll write a piece about it later this week. It’s very interesting.

Behind-the-screen speakers are one of the most awaited features of the new iPhone. But I’m sorry to inform you, guys, that here Sony has already taken the upper hand as well. The new line-up of the TV-sets by this Japanese company already feature the hidden speakers which give a surround sound.

Perhaps, the iPhone 8 will show something revolutionary in design? A glass phone, may be? The last leaks from the Chinese network are smashing this fragile dream to pieces. Have a look at the picture below. Yes, this the new iPhone back panel. The cam is turned vertically and what do we see below the Apple logo?

Image: presumably, the iPhone 8 back panel. Source of image: http://www.slashleaks.com from Baidu

Oh, no! The fingerprint reader! Now you can knock me down with a feather. All these rumors about implementing the infrared sensor under the screen are fakes. Apple failed to achieve the goal and did just the most evident thing of all – shoved the sensor to the back. No, not even the bespectacled phantom in jeans and a turtleneck can save this new iPhone from becoming just one of many flagships of 2017. And the plastic indentation on the front screen? With it the iPhone looks like some Huawei, god forbid. Hey, is it really a premium American brand? Are you serious?