iPhone

Madeline Buxton, Refinery29:

In February, Samsung revealed AR Emoji, a clever (and slightly creepy-looking) way to create interactive avatars that speak onscreen as you speak IRL. Yesterday, Apple revealed their version of the interactive emoji, called Memoji (i.e. Animoji, but make it human).

Besides looking cute, rather than creepy, Memoji have another major plus over their direct competitor: They don’t require users to pick a gender. In fact, the entire creation process is gender neutral — there is no mention of male or female anywhere onscreen. This is an emoji set anyone can relate to, no matter how they identify, what their hair looks like, or even how many piercings they have.

Yet another reason Memoji are head and shoulders better than Samsung’s AR Emoji (which I just find creepy, way the wrong side of the uncanny valley).

As I’ve said before, I believe Memoji will help Apple sell a ton more Face ID devices.

This is pretty clever, both as a product and as a tagline. The AudioMod Qi enabled Battery Case features a 3.5mm headphone jack and a 3200Mah battery.

Price is $88. I’m going to get one, take it for a spin. Good idea.

[VIDEO] Marques Brownlee shows off an in-glass fingerprint sensor and compares its performance side-by-side with an iPhone 8 and Touch ID.

There’s a lot to love about this video (embedded in the main Loop post) but, for me, the highlight is Marques explaining just how the OLED reflection process works, how it shines the screen at your finger and uses the bounced light to detect your fingerprint.

Beautifully done.

Jeff Richardson, iPhone J.D.:

Yesterday, T-Mobile and Sprint announced that they will merge. If the government approves, then we will have only three major wireless companies in the United States. In the communications that I have seen from the two companies, including a joint website that went live yesterday, one of the main themes was that this merger would promote 5G, the next generation of wireless technology. This makes me wonder, what will 5G bring us, and when can we start to use it on the iPhone?

And:

The CTIA, a trade organization for the wireless industry, says that 5G can be 100 times faster than 4G, and a chart on its website predicts a transition from 100 Mbps download speeds to 10 Gbps. 5G will also feature low latency that can make the internet five times more responsive when you initiate each request.

All very interesting, but the most interesting nugget in the piece?

To date, wireless cell technology has been based on huge towers with antennas 125 feet in the air which would provide service for several miles. But it turns out that 5G will be different. 5G is much faster, but the signal doesn’t go nearly as far. So instead of a smaller number of tall towers, 5G will work with a large number of microcells placed around 500 feet apart, often on streetlights or utility poles.

But it won’t just be that microcell on a utility pole. As reported by Allan Homes earlier this year in the New York Times, “[m]uch of the equipment will be on streetlights or utility poles,” but it will often be “accompanied by containers the size of refrigerators on the ground.”

That’s a pretty significant infrastructure requirement. Which, to me, means we’ll only see 5G in the most urban settings.

The whole article is fascinating, suggests we’ll first see 5G iPhone/iPad support in 2020.

[VIDEO] This video (embedded in the main Loop post) is a pretty clever solution for folks who use wired earpods with the newer model iPhone that eliminated the 3.5mm headphone jack. Not to mention it goes hand-in-hand with the previous post.

[H/T Serenity Caldwell]

Everquote study:

Distracted driving is a national epidemic. Our Safe Driving Report revealed that 92% of the drivers in the United States use their phones while behind the wheel.

And:

Taking just five seconds to send or read a text at 55 miles per hour is like driving an entire length of a football field while blindfolded, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Here’s the link to the NHTSA’s distracted driving page, where that last little nugget came from.

From their study of more than 500,000 drivers:

The results showed that 70% of EverDrive iPhone users kept their DND feature enabled; one in four (27%) iPhone users disabled the feature. Of those users enabling the feature, phone use while driving decreased by 8%.

A slice of goodness from Apple that puts your safety first, taking steps to actually prevent you from using their product. Will more of this product curbing emerge over time, steps to help reduce smartphone addiction?

[Via Business Insider]

Pretty, pretty phone. Just take a look at the pics. I would definitely love one of these.

There’s also a new (PRODUCT)RED iPhone X Leather Folio.

From Apple’s announcement:

A portion of proceeds for all (PRODUCT)RED purchases go directly to Global Fund HIV/AIDS grants that provide testing, counseling, treatment and prevention programs with a specific focus on eliminating transmission of the virus from mothers to their babies. Since partnering with (RED) in 2006, Apple has donated more than $160 million to the Global Fund, serving as the organization’s largest corporate donor.

Order online starting tomorrow, April 10th and in stores beginning Friday, April 13.

Every so often, someone pops up with something from the past that seems to imply knowledge of the present. There’s this pic of a young Steve Jobs wearing something that looks an awful lot like an Apple Watch.

Or these paintings from 1860, 1918, and 1937, all showing people staring at their iPhones.

But this one follows a different tack, more an eerie prediction of future tech, in a magazine blurb on the future of computing. Pretty solid predictions.

[H/T, Robert Macmillan]

Obviously, this requires an iPhone X, but if you have or plan to get one, this is worth knowing.

Daniel Eran Dilger, AppleInsider:

The fastest growing segment in global smartphones isn’t Google’s vision for super-cheap, simple Android phones. Instead, according to new market data, it’s refurbished high-quality phones that carry a desirable brand but can be sold at a more affordable price, a segment where Apple is “leading by a significant margin.”

And from the original study from Counterpoint Research:

The low growth of the new smartphone market in 2017 can be partially attributed to the growth of the refurb market. The slowdown in innovation has made two-year-old flagship smartphones comparable in design and features with the most recent mid-range phones. Therefore, the mid low-end market for new smartphones is being cannibalized by refurbished high-end phones, mostly Apple iPhones and, to a lesser extent, Samsung Galaxy smartphones.

This is a pretty interesting development. Apple has added another layer to this market, a layer that it dominates.

First off, interesting timing. On Friday, we posted a piece entitled Things Apple changed, were mocked for, then were copied industry wide, which focused purely on Apple innovation that was first mocked, then drove change in the industry.

This is a bit different, but certainly related.

Fast Company, on this year’s Mobile World Conference:

In most years, MWC is a showcase for Android at its best, with a slew of affordable smartphones, cutting-edge tech specs, and new ideas like curved screens and optical-zoom cameras. The show ultimately demonstrates how Android phones are different—and in some ways, better—than the iPhone.

This year seemed different. Instead of playing up the things that make Android handsets unique, phone makers tripped over themselves to show that they were on equal footing with Apple. In doing so, they came off as cheap imitators, unable to keep up with ideas that may not even be worth pursuing to begin with.

And:

The worst example was the use of a cutout, or notch, for the front-facing camera on phones with edge-to-edge displays. While the iPhone X’s notch is arguably an eyesore, at least it serves a clear purpose, housing the flood illuminator, dot projector, and infrared camera that allow Apple’s Face ID authentication system to work. The notch therefore serves as a statement about the technology underneath, which might explain why Apple paid such close attention to the design of its curves.

None of this was internalized by the notch purveyors at Mobile World Congress. Asus boasted that its Zenfone 5 and 5Z have smaller notches than the “Fruit Phone X,” which is easy enough to pull off when the phones have nothing like Face ID inside. And while Asus says its phones have a higher screen-to-body ratio than the iPhone X, they also have thicker bezels at the bottom of the screen that throw off the edge-to-edge design. The same was true with several other iPhone X knockoffs that appeared at the show.

And:

It doesn’t help that Samsung hints at having Face ID-like powers with its new AR Emoji feature, which creates an on-screen avatar from a scan of the user’s face. As my colleague Harry McCracken wrote, AR Emoji has “none of the uncanny polish and precision” of Apple’s Animoji, perhaps because the S9 doesn’t have any of iPhone X’s face-mapping sensor tech.

This is not an argument that all innovation comes from Apple. It’s more, Apple’s influence has grown to the point that the copying has accelerated and become much more widespread.

[H/T, Scott Knaster]

UPDATE: Add to all this the most prescient observation by Jean-Louis Gassée, from back in December, commenting on Samsung mocking the notch while, at the same time, calling attention to this branding attribute:

The iPhone X’s display has been mocked, notably in this Samsung commercial, for the “notch” at the top, the tiny area where all the Face ID organs (and other sensors) cut into the screen. An astute marketing person pointed to Samsung’s error in fingering the black notch: It’s a distinctive branding attribute, it tells everyone you’ve got a new iPhone X. (And let’s see what Samsung does when they deploy their own face recognition on a future device.)

Mark Gurman and Debby Wu, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing to release a trio of new smartphones later this year: the largest iPhone ever, an upgraded handset the same size as the current iPhone X and a less expensive model with some of the flagship phone’s key features.

And:

With a screen close to 6.5 inches, Apple’s big new handset will be one of the largest mainstream smartphones on the market. While the body of the phone will be about the same size as the iPhone 8 Plus, the screen will be about an inch larger thanks to the edge-to-edge design used in the iPhone X. (Apple is unlikely to refer to the phone as a phablet, a term popularized by Samsung.)

I remember agonizing over the huge size of the iPhone 6 Plus, worrying about it fitting in my pockets, being too large for my hands. I switched and have never looked back. I no longer think of the Plus form factor as large. To me, it has become the new normal.

The thought of the same footprint, but with a nicer display than my 8 Plus, and more pixels, well that’s irresistible. The obvious hitch will be the price-tag.

A 256GB iPhone X is priced at $1,149. I can only imagine that a 256GB iPhone X Plus will be about $100 more (the difference in price between the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus), or $1,249. How far can Apple push that price ceiling?