With the smartphones phasing out all other forms of phones, even the smartphones are no longer just a phone but something more than that. Gone are the days when a phone was meant to only make or receive calls and send occasional text messages. Today’s phones are not just communication devices but a wonder gadget to serve all our virtual needs. Apart from a communication device it becomes our guide showing us the way out with GPS when we are lost. Help us gather information while we are on the move, allow us to sooth our stress by playing stored melodies and help us entertain ourselves and probably a small group of friends, given to understand the ever enlarging size of the screens, with video or even a full size film. Hence it is very important that the smartphone should also be enabled with a smart graphic or video display. The new Apple (AAPL, Financial) iPhones has really improved a lot in this display segment. Let us take a look at the new iPhones enhanced display technology and the factors fuelling it.
Display Tech inside new iPhones
The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sports resolutions of 1335Ă—750 and 1920Ă—1080 respectively, but both Apple devices are still capable of 4K video playback. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will not be able to display the same level of detail expected from 4K videos, which has a minimum benchmark resolution of 3840Ă—2160, since the native displays on the devices are lower, but the ability to playback 4K is still remarkable. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus can manage to play 4K video because of the powerful Apple A8 64-bit system on a chip (SoC) built into the devices. The A8 has 25% more CPU performance and 50% more graphics performance than its predecessor, the A7.
Going by the definition of 4K display it essentially means that the display device should be able to project images with a horizontal resolution of 4000 pixels, commonly found in modern LED televisions and it is an uphill task to pack 4000 pixel in the screen of a smartphone. Not many will store ultra-high definition video in their phones how much ever smart it might be. Moreover a one hour 4K video content requires nearly 110GB of storage, according to VideoMaker.com, which means approximately 2GB per minute. iOS operating system already has the reputation of eating into a lot of storage space owing to its size. This does not leave much space in an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 plus to allow a user to store sensible 4K quality video.
Softorino, a company that developed Mac software for uploading music and video files to iOS devices called WALTR, stated in a press release that they later discovered that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus had the ability to playback 4K video, which they stumbled upon while testing their app. The WALTR Mac app lets users upload files to iOS devices that are not supported by iTunes like MKV, AVI, WMA and FLAC files.
“Uploading 4k videos to iPhone 6 is only possible with the app softorino.com/waltr. This is video proof of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus with A8 chip is able to playback 4K video content packed in H.264,” wrote Softorino in a YouTube video that shows 4K video playback on an iPhone 6.
Display Support
A few apps available in the Apple App Store that claim to support 4K video recording on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus like ProCam 2 and Stop Motion Studio. According to the makers of ProCam 2 4K resolution can be achieved by up scaling the maximum 8-megapixel camera resolution of 3264Ă—1836 (16:9 aspect ratio) to 3840Ă—2160, an up scaling of 17% which sounds quite unbelievable.
Apple recently announced its latest iMac and made tall claims of supporting 5K display on it which means a resolution of 5120Ă—2880 pixels. The 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display has about four times the number of pixels as the standard 27-inch iMac display. In order to make the new iMac with Retina 5K resolution Apple developed a display with the performance to light up 14.7 million pixels. From this it can easily be understood that Apple is putting in a lot of effort towards enhancement and refinement of its display on its phones which used to be a laggard in its predecessors in comparison to the popular android smart phones. If Apple advances in this direction it might not be far when Apple might launch a new iPhone capable of supporting 4K display without the support of any app.
Our Understanding
4K has become widely adopted over the last few years. Back in 2010, YouTube started to support 4K video uploads and already had about 3.8 million 4K videos. Recently, YouTube shifted to VP9 video compression standard, from High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) which according to YouTube supports 4K playback better than the earlier technology. Netflix (NFLX, Financial) has also started streaming House of Cards and Breaking Bad in 4K for TVs that have HEVC decoders, but supporting 4K on a phone seems too much to ask for. Though I doubt how smooth will the experience of 4K video playback be on a phone owing to the fact that it would have storage limitation and what would be the feel of watching a ultra-high definition video in a compact screen on the go. But this move from Apple will make the iPhones all the more popular and in the future it might not be right to refer to the smartphone as a phone; it would rather be referred as a total virtual life gizmo. Apple ones again makes its smartphone stand out of the common lot. It would be worth watching as to how many iPhone sales happen on account of its larger than life display feature.
