The screens on future iPhones could get a lot better.
Lately, there have been a lot of reports linking increased "OLED" screen production to Apple.
OLED technology, which stands for organic light-emitting diode, isn't new. Its origins can be traced back to the 1950s, but we're starting to see more and more devices use OLED than ever before, including smartphones from Samsung and Google's Nexus line.
And it looks like Apple might be using it for the iPhone starting in 2018.
Apple is already using OLED displays on the Apple Watch, so it's not too surprising that it's at least considering OLED for iPhones, too.
As a whole, OLED screens are better than the LCD screens currently used in iPhones.
The caveat of OLED screens is that they're more expensive than LCD, which could help explain why Apple hasn't used OLED screen on its iPhones. But as time goes on and manufacturing processes improve and become more effcicient, OLED screens are becoming less expensive.
So, what would it mean if Apple began using OLED screens on its iPhones?
Thinner iPhones
OLED technology is thinner than the current liquid crystal displays (LCD) Apple uses in iPhones today. That means Apple can make the iPhone thinner than it could if it stuck with LCD.
Everything on the screen would look better
OLED screens are more dynamic and striking than LCD. Samsung phones use AMOLED screens, which look better than the iPhones. So, in a sense, Apple would be catching up with Samsung on the display front.
One way they look better is they display richer, "inkier" blacks than LCD. That's because OLED screens can turn off parts of the screen where there are black items in a picture on the screen, like shadows or anything with the color black.
LCDs on the other hand have a backlight that's constantly on, and it's almost impossible to block out that light completely, thus resulting in a brighter gray color where it should be black.
Blacker blacks results in a better "contrast ratio," where brighter parts and colors of a picture on a screen will "pop out" against the darker parts of a picture. It makes for a more dynamic picture.
Better battery life
Because parts of OLED screens can turn off when displaying black parts of a picture, there's no power being used to display those darker/black areas.
Less power usage = better battery life.
Take the black theme on the Apple Watch's OS. It's taking advantage of the fact that there's no power going to the black parts of the OLED screen, which saves on the Watch's power consumption.
However, you'd only really see a difference if the majority of the apps and things you do on your iPhone are black or dark, like exclusively using a black backgrounds, or if iOS adopted a darker theme, like the Watch OS, instead of the brighter theme it has now.
Curved iPhones?
Because OLED screens don't use backlights, they can be curved. We've already seen curved OLED HDTVs and even smartphones, like LG's G Flex line. Samsung uses curved OLED screens on the Galaxy S6 Edge to make the screen curve down on side edges. That's not possible with LCD screens.
