The iPhone 8 'will not be cheap,' according to a Foxconn executive who leaked information about a potentially disastrous manufacturing hurdle facing Apple's eagerly anticipated new handset. Foxconn Vice President Luo Zhongsheng posted - and then quickly deleted - on the social media site Weibo claiming Apple has run into supply chain issues for the much-anticipated phone and is facing a 40 percent defect rate for its new OLED screen. In the post he warns customers may have to pay a premium to make up for the difficulty related to the'special cutting' of the screens, which are believed to be curved edge-to-edge OLED screens. The status Foxconn VP Luo Zhongsheng posted - and soon after deleted - on the site Weibo, which roughly translates to, 'The OLED yield is only 60%! It looks like difficulty of special-shaped cutting is indeed great, the cost will not be cheap.

New details about the iPhone 8 have been revealed every day so far this week, thanks to engineers who discovered clues about the new Apple handset in leaked code for the firm's upcoming HomePod speaker - and now another likely feature has just been reported. The iPhone 8 camera may introduce support for a new'SmartCam' scene selection feature that would be used to intelligently capture the best photos when shooting specific scenes like fireworks and sunsets, according to one engineer. Guilherme Rambo, who found code suggesting the new photography feature in the leaked HomePod software, also discovered code that references authenticating Apple Pay with facial recognition. The iPhone 8 camera may introduce support for a new'SmartCam' scene selection feature that would be used to intelligently capture the best photos when shooting specific scenes like fireworks and sunsets, according to one engineer The code for the SmartCam suggests an array of scenes including Fireworks, Baby, Bright Stage, Document, Foliage. It's assumed the camera would detect objects in the scene to automatically apply the best setting - Apple already uses this type of image recognition to automatically sort photos in Memories and locate photos in Search.

Yesterday, details about Apple's upcoming iPhone 8 were revealed by engineers who discovered clues in the code for the firm's HomePod speaker. Further details have been discovered today, suggesting the iPhone could have a tap to wake function and facial expression detection. The findings also confirm the long-rumoured removal of the home button, which is expected to be replaced with a virtual button. Because the HomePod speaker will have to work with Apple's new phone, it contains references to some of the upcoming features in its code. Apple revealed its HomePod speaker, which rivals Amazon's Echo and Google's Home, earlier this year.

Flash memory is being drawn into the mainstream of enterprise storage, but its tendency to deteriorate with use remains an Achilles' heel. A paper released at the Aug. 9 start of the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., finds that machine learning can counteract that deterioration and drastically extend its life cycle. The paper was written by Tom Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates (PDF), a solid state consultant in Atascadero, Calif. He is also general chairman of the summit. The paper was sponsored by NVMdurance, a Limerick, Ireland, firm that is applying machine learning in the software it creates for managing solid state devices.