iPhone 5 could feature a "Retina display killer" screen
Summary: Believe it or not, it is entirely feasible to produce a screen of such density.
There's been a lot of speculation about the iPhone 5, in particular relation to the display. Will it be bumped up to 4 inches, or will it be bigger? Or, will it stay at the current 3.5 inches that people know and seem to love?
There are two problems facing Apple with regards to increasing the size of the screen. The first is that increasing the size of the screen without altering the resolution would cause the pixel-per-inch ("ppi") count to drop below that of the current iPhone 4S.
Another problem is that small tweaks to the screen resolution or aspect ratio could break the way current apps are displayed, requiring developers to rewrite their apps to support the new screen.
Take one example. Scaling up the current iPhone 4S 960×640 Retina display screen from 3.5-inch to 4.65-inch while keeping the same resolution would mean that the pixels per inch number would fall from 326ppi for the iPhone 4S to something in the region of 250ppi for a 4.65-inch screen.
That would represent a huge drop in pixel density. It's unlikely that Apple would bump up the screen resolution to accommodate for the larger screen because this would introduce a whole host of scaling problems for existing apps, essentially drawing a line underneath backward compatibility with existing apps.
Doubling the resolution of the iPhone's screen to 1920×1280 would make scaling simpler. It's what Apple did when it went up to the Retina display on both the iPhone and iPad. But such a screen would have a pixel density in the region of 500ppi.
Believe it or not, it is entirely feasible to produce a screen of such density.
LG announced the world's first 5-inch fully-HD LCD panel for smartphones, the highest resolution mobile panel to date. The panel based on Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching (AH-IPS) technology and features 440ppi at a screen resolution of 1920x1080, allowing full HDTV quality on a smartphone.
It's not the only panel to feature such a high pixel density. Toshiba has a 6.1-inch display running at 2,560x1600 offers a pixel density of 498ppi.
Both these panels are "Retina display killer" displays in that their pixel density is far in excess of the 326ppi panel used on the current iPhone 4S. Visually, 440ppi or 498ppi is indistinguishable from 326ppi -- because the pixels are too small for the human eye to discern -- but it would give Apple enough wiggle room to increase the size of the iPhone's screen, while retaining the same aspect ratio of 3:2 and keeping the screen compatible with current apps.
If -- and that's a big "if" -- Apple decides to change the size of the iPhone's screen, my guess is that we'll see a doubling of the screen resolution just as we saw with the transition to the iPhone 4 and the iPad 3.
Image source: Apple.
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Talkback
Adrian, stop with the rumours
Bluetooth 5
Class-1 Laser powered Thunderbolt 2
USB 4
8-core ARM A7X
802.11ac
etc.
One thing is certain: Apple is a lot slower at integrating new standards that people care about than you give them credit for. If you want examples of what they were late-to-market with, it's not difficult to track:
A developer ecosystem
3G
4G
Cut and paste
Cutting the PC sync cable requirement
Reliable WiFi (jury's still out on that one)
Printing (we shouldn't even count their attempt so far either)
This
stop whining..
It's what get people reading.
It's no longer "lets write truthfully about what I feel people in general would be interested in", it's now, "lets craft a a blog geared specificlly towards a subset of readers that will definately buy anything I say".
Are they trying to change the minds of the world, or just spoon feeding people that which they'll dying to eat?
@Uninterested_Viewer
I wouldnt care if they had any sort of links or sources etc, but basically he says....
LG have this new screen, apple could use it....
I could post on a blog, america has this new rail gun, iran could use it and it would have about as much truth as this post.
'late' is better than rushed
You could make a list 10 times as long with technology Apple pioneered or popularized (hint: Wifi is one of them)
Yes, that was Apple's "official line" BUT
AirPrint works great...
The biggest disappointment in the tech is that Apple decided to not natively support it in their routers and desktop OS natively, either at all or without a hack.
Download AirPrint Activator.
Printopia works for me
You should be able to guess that Apple decided to not provide the proxy service itself, otherwise, HPs new printers would of appeared to be a useless investment. By requiring you to buy a printer, or be smart enough to find the CUPs config changes/Printopia "fixes", they kept HPs investment in new technology on the table.
I would guess that in Mountain Lion, we might see them support airprint from the Mac to the printers, and then also a proxy service from the mac to non-airprint devices, with the mac as an airprint destination.
Airplay is supposed to be universal, so why wouldn't Airprint also receive such an upgrade in usability?
Feasible Yes, But...
The new iPad did something similar and required around 1.7 times the battery capacity to maintain the equivalent runtime. They did the trick by making it thicker and leveraging the internal space that was left by reducing the internal components size.
The switch to a 16:9 screen that would allow Apple to keep the resolution compatibility, retain the "retina" precision and remain in a manageable GPU envelope is more likely.
backlight too
There would be no backlight with Super-AMOLED+
LCD density and backlight
The backlighting requirement is the same for higher density same size panel. The panel is just an array filter for a rectangular block of white light. The increased power comes from each pixel having their own little transistor and thus requiring more power when you have more pixels. Extra GPU processing would also use more power. There is no extra power requirement for the backlighting.
Just a thought...
Er, not really. You forget that the retina display takes distance into consideration. It's the same reason why an HDTV looks like utter crap when it's right in front of your face but looks fine when you're on a couch. The 326 ppi is indistinguishable at the distance of a foot. There are many times when I'll bring my phone up much closer to my eyes.
Really?
Eyes away
This would make Apple look bad
....
I have giant meat claws as hands and the screen is fine.
If Apple does anything to increase the screen size, we'll see a 4 inch iPhone. That's really about it. Even then, I think we'll see the same size screen but with a new TFT technology that allows for less powerful backlighting, higher resolution, faster response time, and a thinner display size.