Your Galaxy Phone

Apple’s release of the iPhone 7 could be delayed due to the recent earthquake in Japan, reports say.

According to Newsweek, the magnitude 5.8 quake that hit the Pacific nation “had a significant impact on local industry.” It reportedly forced major companies to close down their factories. These include Sony’s image sensor plant in Kumamoto, one of the hardest-hit regions, and a camera component plant in Nagasaki.

Sony is one of the suppliers of high-end camera sensors to many smartphone manufacturers including Apple. Last Sunday, however, Sony reopened the Nagasaki plant which was the principal production facility. In an interview with Reuters, an analyst said the closure of one plant has little effect on the American tech company. This means Apple fans can relax if they have began worrying about the new dual-lens feature of the iPhone 7.

“The impact of the Kumamoto plant suspension on Apple is expected to be limited,” Hiroyuki Shimizu, principal research analyst at Gartner, said.

Storage slump

Meanwhile, the iPhone 7 may not feature the coveted and top-tier smartphone memory to date. Recently, Samsung’s lightning quick universal flash storage came along with the release of the Galaxy S7. According to BGR, the new storage is based on Samsung’s advanced V-NAND flash memory chips. It can “offer better speeds than typical memory solutions used in smartphones and other computers.”

According to ET News, Samsung will still supply the innovative memory tech for Apple’s iPhone 7. But it was dropped from the current supply chain due to disagreements with manufacturing requests. Currently, Samsung is working with partners to create an EMI shielding for their chips, which could be ready for the iPhone next year.

BGR further clarifies that there are other memory providers looking to service Apple. SK Hynix is one of those and they are hoping to provide in the future the same EMI-protected NAND memory for the successors of the iPhone 7.