【Thailand】

Apple might be Thailandworking on an iPhone that will have a curved screen and will respond to touchless gesture controls, a new Bloombergreport claims.

The report, published Wednesday, says Apple is looking into these radical changes in order to differentiate in the crowded smartphone market.

The gesture control tech Apple is apparently envisioning would let users perform tasks by moving their finger close to the iPhone's screen, but not touching it.

We know that Apple is at least considering this tech based on a patent released in Nov. 2017, which described using the iPhone X's TrueDepth's camera system to recognize hand movements in 3D space. The technology could be useful for augmented reality, which is where Apple has put in a lot of effort in the past couple of years.

The new report however says this technology likely won't be ready for prime time for at least another two years.

The other part of the report also isn't entirely new -- we've heard rumors about the iPhone with a curved screen for years. But Bloomberg's sources claim the iPhone's display will curve "inward gradually from top to bottom," which is very different from screens on Samsung's flagships, which have curved side edges.

This is interesting. We actually know how this might look in reality thanks to LG's G Flex, which curved vertically instead of horizontally. That phone, however, wasn't very well received and LG didn't pursue the idea much further (it did launch a successor, though, the LG G Flex 2), probably partly due to the fact that the curvy screen had no real purpose.

Just like the gesture controls, the curved screen iPhone is still in development and might not ever see the light of day.

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