New details have trickled out about Apple’s upcoming iPad 2’s resolution. It had been previously rumored that Apple’s second-generation tablet will inherit the critically-acclaimed Retina Display from the iPhone 4. The problem is that a 300 DPI, 9.7-inch iPad would need a resolution of 2560 x 1920 - more pixels than Apple’s top-of-the-line 27″ LED Cinema Display.
New information suggests that the upcoming iPad 2 will in fact get a 2048 x 1536 panel running at 260 DPI — double the amount of horizontal and vertical pixels as the iPad 1. Apple may still brand it as a Retina display because the iPad is held further away from your face than an iPhone, resulting is the same effect.
MacRumors reports the discovery of pixel-doubled bookmark graphics in Apple’s iBooks app:
Version 1.1 of Apple’s iBooks application seems to have accidentally included some artwork for this hypothetical pixel-doubled iPad. As shown above, the App’s bookmark icon included versions for the iPad, the iPhone and the iPhone Retina Display (iPhonex2). It, however, also included one additional version labeled “iPadx2″. Sure enough, this is exactly double the resolution version of the iPad icon and is distinct from the other versions.
MacRumors also spotted another tell-tale graphic in iBooks 1.2, a 1536 x 800 pixel wood-tile background. The previous Wood Tile.png in iBooks 1.1 was half of that - 768 x 400 pixels.
So called resolution “doubling” should be easy for developers to support, allowing legacy apps to run in a pixel-doubled mode until developers can re-write them to support the iPad 2’s larger panel. Apple the same thing with the iPhone 4, increasing its resolution from 480 x 320 to 960 x 640.
