The Apple Watch may get an always-on display mode, a new patent has revealed.
Right now the smartwatch requires you to turn on the screen to see the time, but having the display on at all times would obviously impact battery life. There's also another reason Apple hasn't so far enabled the feature: OLED burn-in, where having a static image on the screen for a long time can "burn" a print onto the screen.
Read this: Why the Apple Watch Series 1 might be doing so well
However a new patent filed by Cupertino, discovered by Patently Apple, outlines a method of dealing with this. Interestingly, it wouldn't prevent burn-in but instead adjust brightness and contrast to compensate for the damage over time, making it invisible to the wearer.
While this doesn't mean Apple is working on an always-on display for sure, it certainly is a strong hint.
The patent separately describes a new anti-aliasing technique too, which would smooth out the appearance of images on a curved screen, which is another hint to the rumored larger display on the Apple Watch Series 4.
It's certainly possible an always-on display mode could arrive with the Series 4 on 12 September. Not long until we find out.
Via: 9to5Mac
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By Hugh Langley
Now at Business Insider, Hugh originally joined Wareable from TechRadar where he’d been writing news, features, reviews and just about everything else you can think of for three years.
Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider.
Prior to Wareable, Hugh freelanced while studying, writing about bad indie bands and slightly better movies. He found his way into tech journalism at the beginning of the wearables boom, when everyone was talking about Google Glass and the Oculus Rift was merely a Kickstarter campaign - and has been fascinated ever since.
He’s particularly interested in VR and any fitness tech that will help him (eventually) get back into shape. Hugh has also written for T3, Wired, Total Film, Little White Lies and China Daily.