well, the (totally) flat screen on the AW Ultra is far easier to read compared to the regular model, hmmm, wonder why that is? And what works on a watch doesn't necessarily work on a smartphone.
quite frankly, imho, that curved screen is a gimmick, some type of change to make the phone look/feel different so that people want it ...
Pretty much. The edge curves around the display on the non-Ultra Apple Watches reflect ambient light in a way that can create bright reflections there, which sometimes slightly obscures the visibility of the edges of the display, but maybe not enough to be an issue if the display is bright enough to overcome this. At the very least it's a little distracting.
Jony Ive, who is the originator of the basic curved display design for what will be the 20th Anniversary iPhone, essentially acknowledged that his goal of a "slab of glass" (though not his phrase) iPhone is a sort of gimmick, in that some of his descriptions of the more obvious features of this display sure sound like other ways of saying "because it looks cool".
But a coolness factor was in the iPhone's display design from the start, since the original goal for it, developed by Jobs and Ive, was to have an “infinity pool” effect in which though the sides of the iPhone would have a visible metal band, and the display would have a black border/bezel around it, that when the iPhone was powered off, its front face would be completely black, so that when powered on, imagery seems to emerge from inside it (sounds a little like one of Kubrick’s original ideas for the 2001 monolith). The housing and bezel were supposed to "frame the experience” without competing with it. They also used phrases like “everything should defer to the display”, and out of the "infinity pool" things should “magically appear,” and that the display should even be “a physical object that disappears into the experience” (!!).
After Jobs, Ive later expanded on these goals, saying that the best way to not compete with the display would be to get rid of the metal band and the bezel altogether, or at least shrink them as much as is practical. He wanted the iPhone to be a seamless unibody, with no external parts like the buttons and the metal band around the periphery that remind you, by both their appearance and feel, that you’re holding and looking at a display in a housing, but rather that all you’re holding is a display. The buttons would be replaced by display-based haptic response zones that might even bulge outward, electronically, as bumps on the sides of the iPhone. He said this could also be seen as a practical approach since Apple could move the locations of the buttons in software if they later decided they'd found a better arrangement, or even add new buttons (maybe even allow the user to add new buttons?).
We'll see how much of all this actually makes it to the first iPhone with the new display design.
