Next Apple iPhone To Have a 4 Inch Display? 330
dkd903 writes "According to reports from Macotakara, Hitachi Displays Ltd and Sony Mobile Display Corporation has started shipping the screens for the iPad 3 and a 4-inch LCD screen for an unnamed iOS device. It would be fairly safe to assume that the 4-inch display will be for the next iPhone – the iPhone 5."
It would be dumb to replace the smaller one (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't think it's crazy for Apple to make a larger iPhone if they see a demand for it. But I do think it would be crazy if they eliminated to pocket-sized version. Many men keep their iPhones in a pocket, and without a cover, it just barely works - depending on the pocket. A phone with a 4" screen would just not be easily pocketable. Sure men could get purses too and carry their phones in there. Then the increase in size wouldn't matter so much. But most won't, if the only advantage they gain is having bigger phone to use.
This is making me think that Apple plans to split their iPhone market and introduce two simultaneous model lines, one bigger and one smaller. Yes, it's a little bit inelegant, but I'm sure they did their focus group research and decided that there is demand for this.
Re:I kinda hope not. (Score:5, Interesting)
I previously owned a Droid X, hence my reference to the disadvantage of a screen the size of a toaster.
I like my handheld portable devices to be handheld. I'm a 6' guy with fairly large hands, great for guitar, bass, and piano. I also have good eyesight, so I don't need a large screen, just high pixel density. /shrug
It'd be entertaining to see an iPhone "Pro" with a bigger screen, and an iPhone "Mini" that's usable. ;)
bigger display means a bigger... (Score:5, Interesting)
I tend to agree with John Gruber of Daring Fireball [daringfireball.net] that all of these rumors of larger screen iPhones are just bullshit, except for one detail: a larger screen would mean a larger phone body, which would allow for a larger battery, and would give even longer battery life. Battery life is the name of the game in mobile devices, and the larger display would give Apple an opportunity to get an additional leg up on their competition. It would also be helpful to have more battery capacity if they were upgrading the iPhone to 4G, which seems to need a lot more power.
While I tend to find Gruber's arguments about maintaining the dimensions of the UI by maintaining the dimensions and resolution of the display convincing, the change in dimensions of the iPhone interface going from a 3.5" to a 4" screen doesn't seem to be much of a concern. The greater concern is that the 4" screen is too large for many people to comfortably access the full screen with their thumb while holding the phone in the same hand (though that could be alleviated by narrowing the bezel around the screen).
So, while I'd love to bet against the rumor mongers clamoring for a 4" display on the next iPhone, I think that it might actually happen. A 4G phone will need a bigger battery, and I think Apple would rather make the phone face larger, than make the phone thicker, and that make a 4" display an easy sell.
IGZO doesn't sound very impressive to me (Score:5, Interesting)
""The IGZO technology is perfect in that it offers near-OLED power consumption while having a lower cost and thinness that is only 25% greater than OLED, based on our checks," said Jeffries analyst Peter Misek."
So let me get this right. It's 25% thicker than OLED and uses MORE power, but it costs less to make. On the face of it, that doesn't seem like a very Appley component choice. On the other hand, getting high quality (Super) AMOLED screens means dealing with Samsung, something which Apple doesn't seem to want to do at the moment for silly grudge purposes. So the question becomes, "Does Apple want to sacrifice product quality in exchange for a small savings and sticking it to Samsung?"
If Steve Jobs were still around, I'd say "Yes."--he had a well noted penchant for carrying a grudge to extremes. I'd like a bigger screen as much, or more than the next guy, but I'm not 100% sure how plausible this whole story seems to me in a post-Steve Apple era. On the other, other hand, it might have more to do with the fact that Samsung is too big to bully, and Apple likes to have total control over it's supply chains.
Re:4 inch is a piker...try the (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, a stylus.
Are you telling us that people here in the 21st centurey should not be expected to rise above finger painting? For note-taking? We're not all characters from Idiocracy, thanks very much.
Business knows that it needs the stylus to make their fancy new i-devices useful, and all the big manufacturers are all stepping up to provide.
Jobs is dead, so now the world can undergo some much needed cult de-programming and actually 'think different' for real.
Re:4 inch is a piker...try the (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose anytime you want to write something in your own handwriting or create some kind of art you do it by fingerpainting. After all, big fat sausage fingers are all you really need, right? Of course if you're like me, you get tired of washing paint off your fingers all day long and listening to bank tellers complain that they can't read the amount on your checks. That's why some crazy people are of the opinion that perhaps there are occasions when fingers aren't ideally suited to all the sorts of tasks you might want to perform on a piece of paper and/or a hand-held computing device based on a paper metaphor.
Old devices had styli because the screens were resistive and needed pressure to register touches. Since pressure is a function of force per area, a smaller area (tip of the stylus vs tip of the finger) needs less force applied in order to register touches. It was a necessity that capacitive screens did away with by making fingertips practical.
But just because they are no longer a necessity, doesn't mean they aren't actually still useful for some tasks. If you want to do artwork and or handwriting on a tablet, a stylus is still the best way to go. Just because a screen is capacitive like your iOS devices screen doesn't mean you can't use a stylus if and when it's the right tool for the job--you just need a capacitive stylus.
If you weren't of a mind to do any handwriting/art on your tablet/phone whatever, then simply don't ever use the stylus. Continue using your fingers and you'll enjoy the same user experience you would with any other device. Having the extra choice won't hurt you.
Re:Here We Go.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we just agree that Apple hardware articles are flamebait by default, especially the ones about the mere possibility of new Apple hardware, and stop frickin posting them?
Can we just agree that a huge number of articles on Slashdot, period, are flamebait by default? Anything that mentions {Apple,Microsoft,the Linux community,BSD} will probably get the usual pile of shouting from both sides, anything that mentions global warming will probably get the usual pile of shouting from both sides, anything about Gummint {forcing people to do XXX, nudging people to do XXX, refusing to give money to people who don't do XXX, encouraging people to do XXX} will probably get the usual pile of shouting from both sides, anything about the RIAA/MPAA will probably get the usual pile of shouting (mostly against the RIAA/MPAA in this case),, etc., etc., etc..
Re:Here We Go.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I kinda hope not. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a certain amount of truth in this. People, and their fingers, come in different sizes, different visual acuities. Some are more graceful than others. Some have purses to carry their phones in, some shirt pockets, some cargo pockets. Some prefer a physical keyboard, others a choice of onscreen keyboards. Some need a cheaper phone to suit their wallet, some more battery life, some more storage, some the slimmest possible device. In Android serving these needs is called "choice." On other platforms it's called "fragmentation" and is held to diminish the main.
The Jobsian vision is to make the one best phone they can, and continue to make several historical revisions. This increases economies of scale and hence margins. It simplifies developer needs and update complexity so that one app works on all phones and updates can be swift and sure. It gives a great experience if it suits your needs, and the design is engineered toward a human curve that should fit most. Because it delivers a premium experience for the people it's engineered for they can charge a premium price for it. But if your needs diverge from this solid design that suits most: too bad.
I wouldn't say Jobs' design philosophies are falling down here. By all reports these devices serve so many people so well that customer satisfaction is as high as any product gets, for all products, for all time. Apparently the engineers are masters of the standard deviation and excel at serving huge numbers of people with what they want, even before the people themselves know what that is. And hence the devices are as profitable as consumer products get and then 6x times that. So much so that they gather an estimated two thirds of the profits in the smartphone trade with something like 20 percent of sales. I would call that a win both for Apple and for their well-served customers.
But if it's not for you, it's not. Apparently there are other companies eager to serve the outliers on the curve like you and me. So many in fact that you can find a phone to suit any conceivable assortment of needs that aren't contradictory. These phones can't run the proprietary iOS, but they do run software deemed by many to be close enough in utility and with a grand assortment of applications. In their eagerness to please these phone vendors get bold and try seriously crazy things: pico projectors, 5" screens, detachable keyboards, gamepads for keyboards, phones that dock to a tablet or smartbook, HDMI 1080p outputs, all kinds of stuff. Some of these extreme solutions become niche markets that don't sell many units - on some of them the manufacturer loses money. In general they're not as profitable as iPhone, but it beats earning $10 on a $200 laptop, or $3 on a BluRay player - and it's honest work.
Re:Well you're modded to oblivion already (Score:3, Interesting)
My kids get a big kick out of doing YouTube and Angry Birds on the big screen. Now and then I get a customer with an HDTV in the conference room I can do a slide presentation on or refer to PDF documents with, from my phone. It only takes one million-dollar deal to make it worthwhile and then some for my company, my smartphone and me, so today we're money ahead. I bring the laptop and projector anyway because I'm a boy scout and believe in being prepared - but if it's there I use it. Believe it or not having the phone that does that sells the completely unrelated SAN or network or server technology better than its specs does. It's probably cynical to exploit this, but whatever. The geeks selling the good gear have the good gear, so it may be a legitimate bias. People don't buy rockets from Ford, generally.
It also helps to not be dishing retro crap, but that's on point for neither your comment nor TFA.
Re:Hitachi Makes a Touch Screen That's Pressure Se (Score:5, Interesting)
The iPad display is already capable of pressure sensitivity. Ten-one design/makers of Pogo sketch showed off a demo of using pressure sensitivity for sketching and "palm rejection" back in 2010.
The problem is apparently iPad app developer's aren't allowed to access pressure sensitivity information, because no interface has been exposed by the iOS official APIs [tenonedesign.com].
Until Apple chooses to include it in the API, no 3rd party apps will be able to leverage the functionality, because it would require using 'private frameworks' which is against Apple's rules that app store applications must follow for approval by Apple.