Hot on the heels of the iPhone 8 features report by KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Bloomberg have also written a piece confirming the removal of TouchID. Bloomberg also goes on to say that 3D facial scanning will replace TouchID fingerprint scanning for verification and Apple Pay.
Facial scanning in smartphones has been slow and inaccurate in the past, as many Android phones have proved so. Apple plans to include a 3D scanner for depth perception which should make it difficult to trick it using photographs. The report says that iPhone 8 prototypes are able to unlock within milliseconds with the new face scanning technology. It even works when the iPhone 8 is laying flat on a surface.We are not sure how well this would work in practice – it would need a very wide angle lens and 3D sensor to scan faces while laying horizontal. However, this is a feature which is in testing and might not make it to the final version.
Other tidbits from the Bloomberg report mention the iPhone 8’s OLED display which will have crisp color reproduction and a 10 nanometer processor (likely to be the next generation A11). The 10nm processor would be available for iPhone 8 as well as iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus. In iPhone 8, a new hardware processor to power artificial intelligence tasks would be included. Called Apple Neural Engine, this dedicated chip would ensure that AI tasks like image processing are processed faster and produce lesser load on the main processor and result in longer battery life.
The screen-to-body ratio mentioned in KGI’s report has also been confirmed by Bloomberg. The iPhone 8 will have the same size as iPhone 7s Plus but the screen will be larger thanks to the edge-to-edge OLED display and the replacement of home button with on-screen gestures. There will be a notch on top of the device which will house the 3D sensor, receiver and front camera. iPhone 8 will also have an all glass back and front, with steel edges, which reminds one of iPhone 4 design which also had steel edges. ProMotion displays are also being tested which will include high refresh rate, up to 120Hz. These displays will result in smoother animations and video playback. The displays can also smartly vary their refresh rate and decrease it to save battery life, based on the content being displayed on the screen. ProMotion displays were recently first introduced in iPad Pro.
As we inch closer to September, the month where Apple usually announces the next-generation iPhone models, almost all features have been leaked. The online community has enough information to create 3D printed dummies to showcase what the device would look like in person. However, we still hope that Apple is able to keep some surprises up their sleeves despite all the leaks.
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