New technology always has problems upon release. It’s a simple fact that millions of customers do more testing on a device than a company could ever hope to do in QA. The iPhone has a new reported issue.
After Mapgate, purple haze in the camera, iPhones coming with scratches out of the box and light leakage you’d think we’d know everything. Apparently not as a more serious problem has come to light as it were. According to a report on The Register some iPhone 5s are releasing a green glow described as a plasma bleed from the edges of the screen.
User Hazza42 described it on the Apple discussion forums this way:
Whenever I wake my iPhone there is a split second where a green glow around the edge of the screen is visible. It’s a bit like light leakage but its green and only appears for a fraction of a second after you turn on the screen. It is also sometimes activated by using the slide to unlock, which makes it glow brighter.
This issue has been cataloged elsewhere, but cannot be captured on screenshot suggesting that it’s a hardware issue, not a software one. Several other users said they’d had their green iPhone 5s replaced in store, but not all as they couldn’t reproduce the issue in the store.
The iPhone 5 is using a new complex LCD technology incorporating more color pixels in a layer of capacitive sensor cells. It is relatively new tech so it is possible some things couldn’t be picked up in the relatively limited QA testing. Relative, of course, to several million iPhone customers around the world using their phones everyday. There is legitimate concern about any long term issues this green glow could signify.