While inductive charging has been one of the more talked about features when it comes to the iPhone 8, it turns out Apple’s newest smartphone has another trick up its sleeve.
In an interview with Engadget Japan, Takashi Tanka, the CEO of Japanese carrier KDDI, briefly mentions that the iPhone 8 supports EVS, something that Apple hadn’t mentioned ahead of launch.
Short for enhanced voice services, EVS is a speech audio coding standard. Compared to AMR-WB, an older voice codec that’s currently enjoying wide-spread support amount carriers around the globe, EVS presents several advantages. It offers increased compression stability and a wider frequency. Together, these two features allow EVS to reproduce more life-like voices. EVS is also backward compatible with legacy standards.
Technically, the iPhone 7 was the first Apple smartphone to feature a chip capable of supporting EVS with its X12 modem from Qualcomm. However, not all iPhone 7 models shipped with Qualcomm silicon. More common, especially outside of the U.S., were Intel modems, which did not support EVS at the time. In a bid to maintain feature parity, Apple disabled the feature on X12-equipped iPhone 7s. This time around, however, both Qualcomm and Intel modems support the feature, according to confirmation provided to AppleInsider by Apple.
Of course, as with all of these backend technologies, both the phone and network on which its operating on must support the standard. In the case of EVS, it’s something that carriers across the world are in the process of adding to their networks. We’ve reached out to the big three carriers to see if they support EVS.
Source: Engadget Japan Via: AppleInsider
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