Projected capacitive touch panels typically use one or two sheets of glass to create the sensor, which, in addition to the cover lens (also called the cover, window, or glass), can result in a complex structure. Because of this, touch module makers are trying to integrate the sensor into the cover lens in order to reduce material cost, thickness, and weight.
With less layers between your eyes and the display, optical quality should improve. The 3.5-inch Retina Display on the iPhone 4 is already quite fantastic. And to think something better is not too far away is exciting.
The 4-inch WVGA (800 x 480) IPS panel looks good on paper but misses the mark when compared to the competition. Sure, the colors are rich and the viewing angles are wide, but the LCD washes out more than expected in direct sunlight and suffers from a significant amount of backlight leaking out from the edges of the screen, resulting in visible “stains” on solid, dark-colored content.
Brightness levels are usually not reported for smartphone displays but my guess is that the T-Mobile G2x also known as the LG Optimus 2X isn’t as bright as the competition. Possibly because light is leaking out?
Another item that requires improvement is the screen’s capacitive touch layer, which is slightly less sensitive than on most other phones. Light touches don’t always register, and while this is easily remedied by applying more pressure, it’s rather disconcerting — especially for a handset that’s otherwise well designed.
All of us smartphone users have at one time or another been spoiled by the near-instant response of the touch system used on the iPhones. Once that expectation has been set it is very difficult to forgive a system that isn’t as good. Here’s hoping LG will tweak the firmware settings to make it better.
AT&T:
iPhone activations increased nearly 1 million year over year to 3.6 million, with 23 percent of subscribers new to AT&T; iPhone subscriber churn unchanged year over year
The overall smartphone market is growing and I’m sure all carriers including AT&T will continue to benefit from selling one of the most popular smartphones, the iPhone. This quarterly announcement by AT&T does not mean the carrier was effective in keeping current iPhone customers or that Verizon was ineffective in taking them away. I expect Verizon to announce strong iPhone sales, too.
All iPhones appear to log your location to a file called “consolidated.db.” This contains latitude-longitude coordinates along with a timestamp. The coordinates aren’t always exact, but they are pretty detailed. There can be tens of thousands of data points in this file, and it appears the collection started with iOS 4, so there’s typically around a year’s worth of information at this point. Our best guess is that the location is determined by cell-tower triangulation, and the timing of the recording is erratic, with a widely varying frequency of updates that may be triggered by traveling between cells or activity on the phone itself.
This sucks, especially since consolidated.db is unencrypted. Now I understand the need for iDevice full disk and system encryption, something the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on for federal agencies.
Geekaphone: A “tasty inforgraphic” explaining how green the iPhone is. There is one minor error though. The LCD screen is shown as coming from Japan but actually the 3.5-inch IPS TFT LCD Retina Display used in the iPhone 4 primarily comes from LG Display, a South Korea-based company. The second source is Samsung, also based in South Korea.
DisplayBlog is written and produced by Jin Kim. Subscribe via RSS.