These days, some of the technology industry’s more astounding developments simply don’t come as much of a surprise to the general public. We’ve almost gotten used to increasingly more and more stunning products that seamlessly integrate the various aspects of our lives and connect us with the people, places, and things that matter the most to us. It wasn’t until just recently that technology became such an integral part in the average American life, and it was Apple’s landmark iPhone that heralded this change. Since then, companies like Google have also risen to the newly-created demand for the smartphone, and the resultant competition has brought more and more incredible developments to advance a line of already impressive products. Both Apple and Google have made advancements in terms of hardware and software alike that have changed technology and the way the general public interacts with it — and some of the most recent developments in this race to the technological top are truly incredible.
The iPhone 5 was only just recently released, and is already being described as a marvel of engineering and manufacturing. Hailed as one of the most innovatively-designed consumer products in the history of the smartphone itself, the iPhone 5 has garnered a massive amount of attention for being an incredibly capable machine that is also a physical pleasure to use. The team of forward-thinking designers at Apple, led by the legendary Jony Ive, are no strangers to this kind of recognition, as their lines of laptops and mobile devices have been pushing the lines of brilliant consumer design for years.
Apple’s most recent patent filing indicates that the company aims to seriously shake things up again, as they’ve apparently developed a way to render actual physical components of their smartphones “invisible,” as it were. By using a brand new technique in which a transparent screen will be placed over phone components like a camera, there will be no need to sacrifice display space in favor of physical hardware. A “curtain” of what’s known as polymer-dispersed liquid crystal displays would be activated or deactivated based on the user’s need to access a certain function or aspect of the phone, making the phone able to accommodate a lot more features using a lot less space. Apple seems to have noted that some of its competitors have decided to move in the direction of larger phones to feature more screen space alongside hardware like cameras on the front and back.
The problem with these new, larger phones is that they don’t always fit so well in user’s pockets, and the changing landscape of iphonography, as it were, has aimed to reach a mark of practicality that fits alongside the level of advancements made in terms of hardware and software. With this most recent patent application, Apple truly intends to change the game once more, introducing a new technology that’s been as-yet-unseen in the smartphone industry.
