You might not be excited about tablets these days, not even about Apple’s latest iPad Pro that replaces the iPad Air line. However, there’s a component in the latest iOS tablet that, if adopted in the iPhone 7 later this year, might help Apple overtake Samsung in one critical smartphone feature: Real-life display performance.
A recent report from DisplayMate revealed that the Galaxy S7 OLED display is the best smartphone screen in town, beating all competitors, including the iPhone 6s.
DisplayMate’s expert Raymond Soneira is back with a detailed analysis of the iPad Pro’s screen, which offers an unsurprising conclusion. The iPad Pro 9.7 has an LCD that’s better in every way than any iPad’s screen, including the 12.9-inch model.
The display is “by far the best performing mobile LCD display that we have ever tested, and it breaks many display performance records,” Soneira said.
That remark is crucial as it appears that the iPad Pro beats any competing device, including the Galaxy S7, when it comes to screen reflectance. Samsung’s phone’s reflectance is low as well, but at 4.6% it’s still higher than the iPad Pro’s.
More importantly, lower screen reflectance would let users reduce the brightness of the screen, which leads to better battery life.
Will Apple use the same screen technology for the iPhone 7 this year? Soneira speculates that Apple just might, which would make the iPhone 7’s screen one of the best smartphone displays available this year.
“Since Apple likes to expand new technology across its product lines, an educated guess for the upcoming iPhone 7 is that its display could be a small version of the iPad Pro 9.7,” he said.