This concept is by Guilherme Martins Schasiepen (Flickr photostream) and reported by MacMagazine. It’s a sexy-looking concept with plausible upgrades such as the FaceTime HD camera, 8-megapixel camera capable of 1080p video capture, a thinner body, etc. What I’m not sure about is the 4-inch display that pushes right up against the edges.
Grab your iPhone 4. Look closely at how your fingers hang over the display. On an edge-to-edge display that could constitute a touch, a bad user experience design.
And edge-to-edge display looks beautiful and it works on a device like the Gateway ID47. The tiny bezel allowed Gateway to integrate a 14-inch LCD into a 13.3-inch chassis. That’s great. But for a touch device like the iPhone it doesn’t work that well. And edge-to-edge display on an iPhone would lead to many false-positive touch actuation: you’re just holding the iPhone and it thinks you touched something when you actually didn’t. A lot of folks would get frustrated. I don’t think Apple would go this direction.
For a larger 4-inch display to work the iPhone will need to get a little bigger: not taller per se, but wider. Not much bigger since the display itself will have thinner bezels, the top and bottom could be trimmed a little, but the iPhone chassis will probably need to be slightly wider than the current iPhone 4. That could possibly happen.