18.5:9 accounts for the rumored curvature of iPhone 8’s OLED display: the phone’s active display area is understood to be 5.1 or 5.2 inches in the precise 18:9 aspect ratio.
Apple will use an optical fingerprint sensor to enable authentication directly on the screen, said the report. Additionally, the new iPhone devices will also come with invisible infrared image sensors to enhance the functionality of high-pixel camera and to enable AR applications.
18:9 has been popularized by the latest phones from Samsung and LG, which have screens that are taller than the 16:9 ratio used by the majority of smartphones.
It looks like the 18:9 screen aspect ratio is here to stay, but what’s so special about it?
As a bonus, 18:9 is perfectly suited for Split View multitasking that Apple is expected to bring to iPhone with iOS 11. More importantly, on an 18:9 screen you can have one app on top of another in portrait mode. In the Camera app, as an example, you might be able to take a square photo on half of the screen and review it on the other half.
On the downside, a majority of HD videos today are encoded in the 16:9 format and many games and apps are optimized for 16:9 on a landscape mode. If iPhone 8 will really come outfitted with an 18:9 display, all 16:9 videos will show blank space on the sides of the phone.
As Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica noted in his review of Galaxy S8, the device’s unusual aspect ratio results in pillarboxing when watching 16:9 video without zooming or stretching it.
Thoughts?
[Source]
