The Apple Watch already has one of the best displays on any smartwatch, but the company is reportedly working on something that could make it meaningfully better. 

According to industry sources cited by The Elec, LG Display is currently developing and validating a new display backplane technology. It is called high-mobility oxide, or HMO, and the company is making it on its sixth-generation OLED production lines. 

How does HMO matter for Apple Watch battery life?

Every OLED display needs a backplane, which is the layer of transistors that controls each pixel. 

The current gold standard for Apple Watch panels is LTPO, which improves battery life by allowing the screen to dynamically drop its refresh rate to 1Hz when not being used actively.  

HMO, on the other hand, takes a different approach. It maximizes the inherent low-power advantages of oxide transistor technology without the complex manufacturing steps involved in making LTPO.

The new technology doesn’t require laser crystallization or ion implantation, which, in theory, should result in a display that draws even less power while costing less to produce. In simple words, the Apple Watch models using the technology could last substantially longer than the ones that rely on LTPO technology. 

Apple is evaluating HMO as a potential successor to its LTPO technology for Apple Watch displays. If everything pans out well, we might see the same technology on future iPhone displays. 

When could HMO reach an actual Apple Watch?

The challenge comes down to how quickly the transistors inside the display can switch on and off. 

Today’s mass-produced oxide panels aren’t fast enough for the kind of high-resolution, high-refresh-rate displays Apple demands, and LG Display needs to close that gap significantly before HMO is ready for production at scale. Getting there consistently across a full-sized panel, without sacrificing reliability, is the challenging part.

The report suggests that LG Display could supply the technology for smartwatch applications as early as next year, putting an optimistic timeline for an Apple Watch with an HMO display at 2027 or later. However, I won’t be surprised if it is delayed to 2028.

Keep in mind that everything here comes from industry sources cited by The Elec, and nothing has been confirmed by either Apple or LG Display.

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Once upon a time, Minesweeper was a deceptively simple logic puzzler you’d find bundled on many Windows PCs, but “deceptive simplicity” ain’t enough for today’s Maximum Gamer, whose brain has been honed through years of multiple browser tab usage to operate in 10450302 dimensions at once. And so I give you Minesweeper: Next-Gen.

It’s broadly the same process of trying to clear a board of hidden explosives, with numbers on cleared tiles indicating the number of bombs nearby. But these boards – they are decidedly eccentric.

As the Steam page summarises: “Boundaries can wrap or flip seamlessly; some tiles split into smaller components; certain regions of the map may map onto others, even forming recursive structures.” Rest assured, you will never feel such hatred for the inventors of tessellation (I think it was the Sumerians) as when playing Minesweeper: Next-Gen, which has a demo.

If all of the above suggests a game of dusty, self-cannibalising mathematics, Minesweeper: Next-Gen is actually rather personality-led. It’s a game within a game, featuring two mascot characters – a portly dinosaur, his face a mask of sorrow, and a quarrelsome duck who wears gloves and shoes. They lurk on the margins of each puzzle like chibi Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, their tense expressions at odds with the game’s lilting soundscape of boops and pops.

“These two mysterious little companions will accompany you along the way,” the Steam page continues. “Sometimes they offer helpful hints, and sometimes… not so much. Observant players might uncover fragments of their story – though it’s not particularly important, it does add a bit of charm.” I think “pathos” is the word they’re looking for. A duck who wears gloves and shoes is clearly a duck at war with his own nature, chafing at the capacities of duckdom.

The full game launches later this year, and will include an editor “where you can choose from 200+ distinctive geometric tessellations maps, customize tile colors with a brush tool, and combine countless rules to design your own levels”. You do not have to be a duck or a dinosaur to wield the editor effectively, but it can’t hurt. For something more fantastical and less tessellatory, try Dragonsweeper.

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