This year it has been proclaimed that Apple are once again shaking things up, which was probably essential as they haven’t really brought anything drastically new to the table since the iPhone 6 in 2014. Alas though, as is always the way with Apple, most details of their new phone haven’t been released yet.
Apple iPhone…
What we do know though is that the changes that Apple make will have to be pretty substantial as much of their target market have become disillusioned with the lack of innovation they have provided in the past three models.
Despite the lack of official information from Apple, we now have enough information gathered from around the net to offer a simple product breakdown of what we may expect to see later this year.
The iPhone 7s/7s Plus will not be the flagship handset and is expected to remain true to the design and technological capabilities of the previous model. A slight increase in spec is perhaps all that will be offered.
The iPhone 8 is expected to be an entirely new concept for Apple and it’s believed that they’re going to pull out all the stops for it. And they’ll have to to justify the rumoured £1000 price tag.
iPhone 7s/iPhone 7s Plus – This will no longer be the flagship handset and will probably remain true to the design and technological capabilities of the previous models.
iPhone 8 – This will be an entirely new concept for apple, aside for the fact it will now have an OLED display, at least. And I think as to be expected this handset it going to be reaching for the skies on price as well, with the base model currently rumoured at £1000.
Key Features
The most obvious change coming with the iPhone 8 is the drastically increased screen-to-body ratio. Following the trend set by the LG G6 earlier this year, the increased ratio means that more of the phone’s front will be a display. This means that they will likely be able to have the 5.5-inch iPhone 7+ size display on a phone the size of the 4.7-inch iPhone 7. However, this does come with serious drawbacks. After the much-discussed removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack Apple aren’t letting up with the changes, and it appears that this year the home button and the associated Touch ID fingerprint scanner will be sacrificed to make way for the larger display. It is expected that the top of the phone will have 3D facial recognition sensors to replace the Touch ID fingerprint scanner. Another rumoured change was that the lightning charging port was going to be replaced by a USB-C port, however we think that this was a misunderstanding and that the USB-A on the charging cable will likely be changed to a USB-C to align it with other Apple products and allow faster charging.
In addition to covering more of the front of the phone, the new screen will be an OLED panel. As an OLED screen produces its own light, there’s no need for a backlight and therefore making the phone thinner and more energy efficient. In addition to this, it means that individual pixels can be turned off, allowing for ‘truer’ blacks to be created and a subsequent widening of the colour gamut. There’s also a faint rumour going around that the bottom of screen where the bottom bezel used to be may be used for customisable function buttons – similar to the Touch Bar on the Macbook Pro. Whilst unconfirmed, it would offer an interesting feature for the phone.
The usual chip upgrade will happen (with this year’s likely to be named the A11). What is of particular note is the manufacturing process has been changed to allow the transistors in the processor to be placed more densely. This should result in a sizable increase in performance and potentially some energy efficiency savings too. Of more interest is that some of the dummy models received had a glass back, meaning it is very likely that at least some of the iPhone 8 models will have wireless charging.
There seems to be little change with the camera though, apart from that it will likely be used as part of the facial recognition log-in system. The dual-lens camera from the iPhone 7 Plus will probably come standard on all models, with the only change being that the telephoto lens will also have optical image stabilisation.
| NETWORK | Technology | GSM / CDMA / HSPA / EVDO / LTE |
| LAUNCH | Announced | Not announced yet |
| Status | Rumored |
| BODY | Dimensions | 143.5 x 71 x 7.5 mm (5.65 x 2.80 x 0.30 in) |
| Weight | – | |
| SIM | Nano-SIM | |
| – IP68 certified – dust and water resistant – Water resistant up to 1.5 meters and 30 minutes – Apple Pay (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX certified) |
| DISPLAY | Type | Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors |
| Size | 5.1 inches (~61.0% screen-to-body ratio) | |
| Resolution | 1242 x 2800 pixels (~601 ppi pixel density) | |
| Multitouch | Yes | |
| Protection | Ion-strengthened glass, oleophobic coating | |
| – Wide color gamut display – 3D Touch display & home button – Display Zoom |
| PLATFORM | OS | iOS 11 |
| Chipset | Apple A11 | |
| CPU | Quad-core |
| MEMORY | Card slot | No |
| Internal | 64/256/512 GB, 3 GB RAM |
| CAMERA | Primary | 12 MP, f/1.8, 28mm, phase detection autofocus, OIS, quad-LED (dual tone) flash |
| Features | 1/3″ sensor size, geo-tagging, simultaneous 4K video and 8MP image recording, touch focus, face/smile detection, HDR (photo/panorama) | |
| Video | 2160p@30fps, 1080p@30/60/120fps, 720p@240fps | |
| Secondary | 7 MP, f/2.2, 32mm, 1080p@30fps, 720p@240fps, face detection, HDR, panorama |
| SOUND | Alert types | Vibration, proprietary ringtones |
| Loudspeaker | Yes, with stereo speakers | |
| 3.5mm jack | No | |
| – Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic – Lightning to 3.5 mm headphone jack adapter incl. |
| COMMS | WLAN | Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, hotspot |
| Bluetooth | 4.2, A2DP, LE | |
| GPS | Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS | |
| NFC | Yes (Apple Pay only) | |
| Radio | No | |
| USB | 3.0, reversible connector; magnetic connector |
| FEATURES | Sensors | Fingerprint (front-mounted), accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer |
| Messaging | iMessage, SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Email | |
| Browser | HTML5 (Safari) | |
| Java | No | |
| – Wireless charging – Siri natural language commands and dictation – iCloud cloud service – MP3/WAV/AAX+/AIFF/Apple Lossless player – MP4/H.264 player – Audio/video/photo editor – Document editor |
| BATTERY | Non-removable Li-Ion battery | |
| MISC | Colors | Jet Black, Black, Silver, Gold, Rose Gold |
iPhone 8 release, “When can I get my hands on it?”
Well as per information received from one of the tech giants manufacturing companies, they haven’t even received the finished plans for the back of the handset. So although we are currently expecting the phone to be released in September, there are rumors this could be delayed until November.