Apple To Double iPhone 5S Retina Resolution

Today we’ve got a new report form the folks at Appleinisder claiming Apple is planning to increase the resolution of a future iPhone model to 1.5 million pixels — double that of the pixel count on the current iPhone 5.

The details come from a report by Chinese-language Weiphone (via Unwired View), which claims that the next-generation Retina display will be featured on Apple’s next-generation handset, whether it be known as the “iPhone 5S” or “iPhone 6.” The report claimed that the next iPhone will continue to have the same 4-inch display as the iPhone 5.

The story also alleges that the device will be thinner compared to the already thin iPhone 5 and borrow design cues from the iPad mini, such as the narrower side bezels.

You’re advised to take the story with a grain of salt.

For starters, introducing a new screen resolution would only require programmers to spend more time optimizing their apps for it, without any clear benefit in terms of the visible difference.

That’s not saying that 1080p phones don’t make sense – they do, but only if their screen sizes are closer to five than four inches diagonally.

According to DisplayMate President Dr. Raymond Soneira, the extra sharpness of a typical 1080p smartphone display is mostly wasted because your eyes typically “can’t resolve sharpness above 229 pixels per inch.”

For some people, it is possible to tell the difference if we were to sit down and study a 1080p display and a 720p display, side-by-side.
If you’re really a fanatic and you study images, or you have some professional applications and you’re really into displays, then it may make a visual difference for you.

The current iPhone 5 has a pixel count of nearly 730,000 thanks to its screen resolution of 1,136 by 640 pixels. That works out to 326 pixels per inch on the 4-inch display.
Apple introduced the “Retina display” branding for its screens with the launch of the iPhone 4 in 2010. That handset featured a 3.5-inch display with a resolution of 960 by 640 pixels, double that of its predecessors.

At the time, Apple’s Retina display was a market leading feature for the iPhone. But since then, devices like the HTC One, with a 468-pixel-per-inch display, have hit the market.

The HTC One crams a 1080p-resolution screen, the equivalent of a full-fledged high-resolution television, into a 4.7-inch space. That’s more than 2 million pixels, putting it at a density substantially higher than Apple’s iPhone 5.