Why is iPhone X the future of smartphones?

'Say hello to the future'

Apple's introduction to iPhone X What should not be misunderstood is that the text of this article is not that the iPhone X has "brought the smartphone a long time ago" but "it showed the future of the smartphone." We have to wait a little longer to launch, but it's clear that we are talking about the open part. Therefore, it is noticed that there are many consumers who are worried about the superiority of the design from the external design to the advantages, the use of functions, the price, etc., but the text can not be a solution to alleviate such anxiety.

At dawn yesterday, Apple unveiled its next generation iPhone, the iPhone X, at Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park, a new office in Cupertino, Calif.

The iPhone X is equipped with a 2436 x 1125 resolution 5.8-inch Super Retina display, A11 Bionic chip and neural engine, M11 motion coprocessor, 12MP dual rear camera and 7MP TrueDepth front camera, 3D touch and waterproof / Supports new functions 'Face ID' and 'Animoji'. There are two types of colors, space gray and silver. Storage space is divided into 64GB and 256GB models. The launch will be in December, and you can book in advance on the 27th of next month. Pricing starts at $999 for the 64GB model and $1,149 for the 256GB model.

iPhone X

The most noticeable feature on the iPhone X is the 'missing home button'. The rumor that Apple will remove the home button began in 2011. Apple's 2011 release of Virtual Assistant Siri (Siri) could replace the home button. And in 2015, Apple patented a technology to mount a fingerprint sensor on the touch screen, so it was thought that one day the removal of the home button would be done. Rumor has it that Siri replaces the home button, but it does not have a fingerprint sensor on the touch screen, but Apple has removed the home button from the iPhone anyway. And the missing home button is the first reason iPhone X is seen as the future of smartphones.

Of course, there is a question. There are a lot of smartphones that do not have a home button, and the soft keys are well established. But can you talk about the future of smartphone just because the home button disappears? But the missing Home button needs to understand that it is not the function of the Home button or the user experience but the interaction and interface.

Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of Apple, added 'How' to the description of the missing home button in Keynote. Now that the Home button has disappeared, I can now say, 'How can I call Shiri?', 'How do I get back home?', 'How do I multitask?', 'How did unlocking change?' And the role of the home button had to be explained to where it had been transferred. This is not good in terms of user experience. I split the experience into one interface called Home Button. But you need to consider what Apple has added for interaction.

3D Touch has become an essential feature for iPhone users since the iPhone 6s. In the early days, there was a lot of skepticism because of lack of support items, but now it is playing an important role in interactions to divide the generation boundary of iPhone user interface from supporting 3D touch and not supporting it.

3D touch

Shirley is one of the most famous voice interfaces on smart phones. It reduces the need to touch the screen and provides a voice-centric user experience. It's still focused on simple commands, but since last year, Siri Kit, an SDK that allows external developers to access the system, has become a more comprehensive voice interface. And now the syllables can be called with the voice, not the home button. It may be negative for the current performance of Siri, but it can not be denied that it will remain one of the key interface of iPhone as a result.

There is also haptic feedback. Apple has added a new component called the "Taptic Engine" from Apple Watch and it is haptic feedback that transmits the information to the user with the vibration and the audible sound generated by the tapping engine. The 3D touch of the above may have heard the question "What is the relation between 3D touch and home button?" The haptic feedback is an interface to transmit the result of interaction of the 3D touch to the user. It is also an interface that directly replaces the interaction of the physical home button. In fact, Apple has already removed the physical home button before iPhone X. The home button on the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7+ was not a real home button but a fake home button that only transmitted the feeling of being pushed through with vibrations and audible tones.

Thanks to the haptic feedback, the task was to move the physical interaction focused on the home button to the entire iPhone. This is well understood in VoiceOver, an easy-to-use function for the visually impaired. Previously, the blind could physically interact with the iPhone only with the home button. However, with the introduction of 3D touch, the voiceover enabled physical interaction with the entire display of the iPhone. Thanks to this, Apple has made the multitasking gesture of the 3D touch removed from iOS 11 available when VoiceOver is turned on. Multitasking of the 3D touch is unnecessary because it overlaps with the bottom gesture of the iPhone X, but multitasking through the interaction of the 3D touch on the iPhone still using the home button is a necessary function for the visually impaired. Later, it may be removed, but the important thing is that the physical disability of the visually impaired can be physically interacted even if there is no home button while planting a physical sensation throughout the iPhone display.

A taptic engine

The last is the face ID. Touch ID has disappeared as Home button was deleted. Touch ID, however, is an important authentication interface for the iPhone, as well as unlocking and login and billing. So Apple added a new authentication interface, Face ID, to iPhone X. All that was possible with the existing Touch ID can now be solved with Face ID, which is now Face Recognition.

Apple distributed the functions of the home button to the above interface. However, 3D touch, serial, and haptic feedback are not an interface that suddenly appeared on iPhone X. Apple has encouraged users to fully familiarize themselves with the interface and have a new user experience. It is not a good user experience to talk about the function of the home button, but considering the role of the individual interface, the function of the home button rather than the invention of the interface for replacing the home button function is more intuitive It is correct to say that the user experience has been implemented. Rather, the home button was responsible for too many functions.

More briefly, Apple added an interface to create a new user experience on the iPhone. And since each interface has made it easier to implement the home button user experience more intuitively, the need for a home button has been reduced and it has been removed from the iPhone.

The focus is not on the home button, but on the iPhone's other interfaces and user experience. So far, both smartphone and human interaction have been done through visual information and touch screen. But now there is a voice interface, and it can also physically interact with the display. The new interacting behavior of physical interaction is the peek and pop of 3D touch.

iPhone home button

Now, let's recall the interaction that occurred in the touch interface before 3D touch. Initially, the button was all but divided into tabs and swipes, the tabs were double-tabbed, and the swipe was a drag-and-drop. This phenomenon occurred each time in the evolution of the interface. In other words, iPhone X is a collection of new interfaces, called 3D touch, serial, haptic feedback, and face ID, showing how the user experience can be achieved by deleting the home button. This is a very important point in the field of user interaction, because the future of smartphone can be increased by human interaction. And it took many years for this point to be made. Since Apple took over Siri in 2010, it has been at least seven years.

It's easy to think about what happened as the interface was added to a regular desktop PC. Keyboard, mouse, graphical user interface (GUI) and USB. So the future of smartphones through the new interface is an interesting story. Smartphones will be able to do more than now. And the device at that point is iPhone.

If you have read this far, I think you have felt that the pace ID lacks explanation. It is necessary to talk separately. Face ID is the second reason why iPhone X is the future of smartphones.

Face ID

The Face ID works with an infrared camera, a flood illuminator, and a dot projector on the front of the iPhone. The dot is projected onto the face by the dot projector, and the infrared camera recognizes the face by reading the dot pattern.

It is not new technology. The Depth Sensor is quite familiar, and it's easy to see that Microsoft's Kinect and Google's Tango, which uses Intel's 3D camera Real sense, ). Moreover, PrimeSense, which Apple acquired in 2013, has developed Kinect's 3D sensor, which is also highly relevant. However, the fact that the technology has been successfully installed on smartphones and the intent of it, makes the difference between iPhone X and existing smartphones.

First, it is necessary to understand where the depth recognition technology started. Depth recognition technology began with cognitive computing, a technology that simulates a person's cognitive ability. Obviously, cognitive computing has not been started by Apple, but has been studied as a core area of ​​computer science since the early days of computers. And depth recognition technology, which is a way of letting the computer recognize three dimensional space, surrounding environment, and things, not two dimensional, as a strand of cognitive computing has been developed. So while Apple mentions machine running in keynotes, in fact, it can not be said without the machine running in the development of modern cognitive computing. The computer must have the ability to learn and identify things. Furthermore, the definition of cognitive computing will become more complicated, but anyway, depth-of-cognition technology has begun to find a way for computers to perceive 3D.

Truedepth camera

Tango's Google first introduced this technology to smartphones. However, Tango was developed to implement augmented reality (AR). To apply the AR object to the perceived surroundings. Of course, Apple also demonstrated a snapshot of the demonstration of applying more precise AR objects to the face. But ultimately it has tango and other intentions. As mentioned earlier, Face ID is an authentication interface, because the purpose of the computer is to identify people and identify them.

So some people say that Face ID developed for the purpose of replacing the Touch ID to get rid of the Home button on the iPhone, but as explained above, the causal relationship is reversed. Depth recognition technology for cognitive computing has been a field of research for any company involved, and Apple was just one of them, and the pace ID was presented as one of the results. The important thing is that Apple has built deep recognition technology into the product / functionality and mounted it directly on the smartphone, and now the smartphone will know who the user is. It's not exactly what smartphones need to think about. It is not that smart or versatile. However, the key is that smartphones have such a sense.

And the process for applying the technology is noteworthy. The A11 Bionic chip and neural engine on the iPhone X specialize in artificial neural network operations. For example, Google's Alpha has put Go in a way that delivers results computed from the server. However, computing through the server is slow in immediate data processing. This is why GPUs are embedded directly in autonomous vehicles that require quick judgment. Google initially used NVIDIA Tegra chips for Tango and recently used MediaTek chipsets. This is also the purpose of the A11 bionic chip and neural engine.

A11 Bionic chip

Interestingly, Google is also developing its own chips in 2015 to integrate Tango platforms, 3D sensors, and APs to create smoother ARs. But similar specialized APs are under development by Samsung, Mediatech, Qualcomm and Huawei, so it will take time to give consistency to hardware and software. Thanks to this, Tango smartphones have not spread well even though they introduced computing to smartphones ahead of Apple.

There is also Microsoft's HoloLens, which is consistent, but not the size of the platform and not yet available in the consumer market. Microsoft has also developed its own CPU, GPU and coprocessor called Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) for the holographic lens. HPU also specialized in artificial neural networks like neural engines. So it was possible to maximize the mixed reality (MR) capability, but the Hololens will not be available until 2019 in the consumer market.

On the other hand, Apple not only integrates hardware and software in cognitive computing, but also releases it in December. iPhone X will be the fastest growing cognitive computing smartphone. Will this technology stop at the pace ID? You can even have a truedepth camera on the back for a more precise AR function like a tango. Still, the fact that the TrueDevice camera is only mounted on the front of the iPhone X seems to be due to unit price increases and yield problems. It is possible to implement AR with depth recognition through dual camera even if it is not a true-depth camera. Therefore, it can be interpreted that the AR was first picked up toward face recognition rather than AR, and this is the beginning of technology development of smartphone and cognitive computing.

So what about competitors? As mentioned earlier, Google and Intel are developing depth recognition technologies, while Qualcomm and Huawei are developing APs. Now all that is needed is a platform to integrate these technologies as shown by iPhone X, and the level of development will increase, so smartphones with configurations similar to those of iPhone X will increase quickly. In order not to be distracted from competition, competitors may suddenly release tango phones for two months before iPhone X launches.

Air Power

So this is not to say that iPhone X is superior, but that iPhone X has created such a boundary. Extended interfaces and cognitive computing, and broadly AI, are the boundaries between universal smartphones and non-smartphones. So I think iPhone X has brought the smartphone back to the transition. Just like the first iPhone 10 years ago. Apple's explanation of the iPhone X also confirms this.

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It was our vision that we always pursued to make iPhone with the whole screen on the front. The physical entities of the device are gone, the experience is immersive, and the iPhone is the one with all of it, with a tap, a voice and even a smart response to eye contact. Now that it's iPhone X, it's a reality. Now the future faces you completely.

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I do not know how smart the iPhone is. I have not tried it yet. However, it is obvious that the vision of the smartphone is presented later. It took about two months until the encounter with the future.