What can Apple do to take the iPhone to the next level?

Tram Ho

There has been a lot of talk about how to make iPhone – or phones in general – “good enough”. The problem is, most of the current phones have done almost everything that most people need almost anytime, anywhere. Apple, Samsung, Google, and others should take a short break and stop upgrading them every year. iPhone 12? Who needs it? iPhone 11 has too many features already.

But is it true that phones today are good enough?

Perhaps the iPhone (including the rumored iPhone 12 model) and perhaps all existing and upcoming phones this year will take advantage of only a tiny fraction of their potential.

Design

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We’ve seen a number of vendors bring cameras and sensors down the screen, and this trend will continue until phones with screens dominate the front, be bezel-less, unimpeded by any Anything else, became popular.

But what we really need are screen technologies that aren’t as easily scratched or broken as they are today. The iPhone is the phone that brought Corning’s Gorilla Glass to the mainstream phone market, and the ion exchange reaction applied on this glass still requires a lot of fine-tuning to achieve the optimal balance. between strength and rigidity, because they are still easy to scratch and crack.

The sapphire glass covering the Apple Watch screen has been shown to be much more durable. Apple has sought to bring sapphire glass to the iPhone, even building a factory to serve that purpose, but macroeconomic related conditions simply haven’t allowed this to happen – at least. is at that time.

But Apple and other manufacturers certainly haven’t given up on sapphire or other potential hybrids, because our phones really need to be more durable. Nor must they slip from the grip of the hand, or off the table, or anything else we place them on.

The glass back is a reasonable choice to bring wireless charging to the phone, but since the Nexus 4, then continue with the iPhone 8 to 11, and culminated in the Galaxy Flip, the glass back has become A curse that everyone dreads when talking about falling.

Manufacturers have done many things over the years to make the glass surface look lumpier – the rough surface of the iPhone 11 Pro is the latest example. And while they look cool, they actually don’t make a significant difference to the phone’s smoothness.

But this is a real problem in phone design. Because a phone should be able to be placed on any flat surface without making its owner worried about his device sliding and falling to the floor. Whether the fall will cause the glass to break or not, we all have a heart attack every time that happens!

Camera

Over the years, Apple has equipped the iPhone with better optics, more powerful image signal processors, and more sophisticated machine learning algorithms to turn tiny sensors and lenses. so good is the sensor and large lens on separate cameras. But the road ahead is still very long.

Despite Deep Fusion and Night Mode, iPhone photos can still cause heavy noise in low light. In addition, the possibility of optical zoom is still a mystery. iPhone 7 can zoom 2x, but since then, everything has remained still. Meanwhile, Samsung, Huawei, and others have equipped their phones with far-reaching telescope cameras, while Google has significantly improved HDR + in Super Res, thereby increasing Enhanced digital zoom quality.

If we want to take pictures of kids, or pets, while playing in the park, we can’t always zoom with … feet. We need cameras that can zoom far. That’s one of the few remaining advantages of a mid-range PnS camera when compared to an iPhone.

Another photography feature the iPhone should have is a neural density filter. ND filters are often used on sunny days, when shooting outdoors, and we want to limit the amount of light entering the lens to avoid issues such as lighting up the sky, while maintaining accuracy. of color. Just like you wear sunglasses for the camera.

Smart HDR on the iPhone has so far handled very bright outdoor situations. But with the ND filter, image quality will be even better in more complex situations. OnePlus showed off a concept phone at CES earlier this year, which uses sharp glass to both hide the camera lens and create an ND filter. This kind of technology will one day bring us the opposite of Night Mode – Bright Mode, which means taking photos in excess light conditions.

Biometric authentication

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We had Touch ID on iPhone 5s, Face ID on iPhone X, and then the return of Touch ID on iPhone SE 2020. It’s all good. Face ID is more transparent than Touch ID, but it doesn’t work well when users wear a mask. Similarly, Touch ID does not work when the user is wearing gloves, and may have problems if we often wash our hands. Both forms of biometrics are not perfect.

We need a multi-mode biometric system. The phone needs to recognize the geometric features of the face, voice excerpts, fingerprints … It also needs to know our gait, and from there build a dynamic security system with the ability to hold the phone open. lock when it is certain the owner is holding the device, and only require biometric scanning when not sure. That way, no matter what we are wearing or doing, we will never be “locked in the door” by our own phones.

Performance

Apple, undeniably, has built the best mobile chips on the market today. The only problem with Apple’s A-series processors is that they are so powerful that they drain the low-capacity and aging batteries much faster than older, lower-performing processors.

RAM is also a problem. RAM is random access memory, and it is different from storage memory. RAM is like the number of things we can hold in our hands at any given time. Storage memory, like SSDs, is the amount of things we can store in our cupboards to free our other work. Because we can only hold a limited number of items at once, when a new item is placed, some old items will fall off.

Because iOS uses native apps, there’s no translation layer in the middle, and doesn’t do things like system garbage collection, the iPhone can work well without having as much RAM as other phones. But to be so, the application must be written carefully and do not occupy too much RAM when operating, and also do not hold RAM longer than necessary.

It’s okay if you regularly use old apps before, but it’s not so good in the age of poorly optimized social networking apps, online games developed for multiple platforms, and applications that interpret themselves, such as web browsers with an almost infinite number of tabs open, and camera applications, depending on the amount of data they load and process – which increases exponentially through each new model. Such operations can make these applications exist after one or two conversions, after which they will be forced to restart and reload.

Recently, Apple has started to handle this problem the way Android phones have been handling for years – adding RAM. If the rumors are accurate, then the iPhone 12 Pro will have up to 6GB of RAM.

Some Android phones are also starting to allow users to put apps into RAM so they are never turned off. But doing so is like using tape to attach objects to our hands. It will reduce the space for other things we want or need to hold later.

What is the best solution to this problem? We don’t know yet. Perhaps gaming and social networking apps should do a better job of buffering and staying active, so they don’t turn off and have to be reloaded or restarted, even if we leave them running in the background. in a long time. This means that we will be able to interact with them, or at least partially interact while they continue to update the status in the background.

More battery and better

The last thing we can always upgrade is the battery life. We all want a battery revolution that allows users to charge only once, use it a week or a month, instead of having to charge it twice or more times a day. And we can improve neural networks so they optimize the battery manufacturing process we have today.

The above are just a few areas where the iPhone 11, or even the next iPhone – and basically every other phone – is not good enough. “Not yet”!

Reference: Medium

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Source : Genk