How sharp is the iPhone 4's screen? High Res 4 vs 3GS images (opens in new tab)

The panel used on the Droid is of the TN kind, so the viewing angle is nowhere near as good as the iPhone 4 -- the perspective difference between your left and right eye is also enough to make the screen appear different to each, which makes it harder to look at and resolve detail. The iPhones up until 4 are all like this, too, which is one of the reasons why the difference between them is so striking.

The Droid is a cheap plastic gizmo. Two of my friends have had theirs slowly break from everyday use. If you have to baby your gadget, it will never really break into the mainstream and make a difference.

(I still like AMOLED more.)

Droid and Nexus were widely praised for their displays, the displays were mentioned whenever anyone wrote anything about the phones.

Seeing how the iPhone now has a substantially higher resolution and a ISP screen, it getting praise seems to me to be pretty normal.

Another thing is that the number of pixels increases as the square of the ppi, so a 326 ppi screen has 51% more pixels than a 265 ppi screen. That's a bigger difference than a person might think from just comparing ppi.

I think the main reasons this is getting more press is because the resolution is over the ~300 ppi barrier that makes most eyes unable to resolve pixels.

The square design of the iPhone 4 is functional (try balancing a 3GS on its side to do a video call...), so whether you like the design or not it is a necessity.

> (Also, I'd love to find reviews of critics about the "squared, industrial" design on the Droid and their opinions on the "squared, industrial" designed iPhone. But I digress.)

I think you might be confusing an industrial look with industrial design. The latter is a practice, not a style.

The Droid has a more squared, industrial look. iPhone 4 has a more squared industrial design relative to its predecessors, but not so much an industrial look.

What amuses me is that before the iPhone 4, iPhone users insisted that the iPhone resolution is perfect and no higher resolution was necessary. Now suddenly they would never ever consider buying a phone with less resolution.

Well, you wouldn't happen to have a comparable picture of the droid at hand?

1. Not likely on the iPad, because in order to get 326 PPI on a 9.7" diagonal device, you have to pack 2530 x 1898 pixels onto it, which is 610% increase over the currently shipping specs. That kind of display takes a lot of power to drive, and would perform extremely poorly compared to a similar device at 1024x768.

The iPad already reportedly falls pretty flat under conditions that tax the GPU's fillrate. Sextupling the amount of work that the GPU has to do likely wouldn't do the device any favors for performance or battery life, both of which are key marketing points.

Googling seems to indicate that the iPad has an A4 Mali GPU, which has a fillrate of about 100M pix/sec (by comparison, my desktop's Radeon 4850 has a fillrate of ~24 billion pix/sec). Each paint operation paints a certain number of pixels, and you'll do several of those per frame. At 1024x768 (786,432 pixels), the maximum fillrate-limited FPS to paint a one-pass single-color surface is about 127 FPS. Now, increase that to 2530x1898 (4801940 pixels) and your max FPS for the same operation drops to about 21 FPS - and that's just for painting a single color. Actually doing anything useful would utterly destroy the device. To compensate, they'd have to put in a beefier (more power-hungry) GPU. It's quite possible to build a device that would perform well at those specs, but it would be very expensive, and very difficult to fit into Apple's typical sexy form factors with any appreciable battery life.

(It's been a few years since I've done high-performance graphics work, so if I'm off here, someone please correct me.)

I'd be happy for a while if Apple follows the trend it set with iPad and iPhone 4 and starts shipping notebooks with IPS screen even if resolution is the same as it is now.

Display technology usually increases in cost exponentially with screen size.

I think it's more likely that the iPad will do a similar x2 increase in resolution, i.e. go from 1024x768 to 2048x1536...

You don't need the same level of DPI on the iPad and it would just take too much grunt to push the same DPI as the iPhone on that screen.

The improvement in the sharpness of the NYTimes logo is astounding. Call me a fanboy, but this kind of improvement in resolution is exciting.

Also, imagine a 30inch panel at this ppi... one positively quivers.

Any idea where I can get an actual (home+power) screenshot from the device?

> My eye doesn't have a zoom. I see things at their actual size and even holding my phone right up to my eye I can't get it as large as those images. Details that I can't see without artificial zoom are the same as details that I can't see period.

They're zoomed because it's the only way to demonstrate the difference when the display you're looking at almost certainly has a lower PPI. It's no different from having to zoom in on a print sample to show how clear a printer's text is on a monitor.

> Clearly, higher resolutions up to some point are better for display purposes, but there's tradeoffs involved. I believe smaller pixels means less light gets through, it's more work for your processors which means less battery life, etc.

Which makes it all the more impressive that iPhone 4 has four times the contrast ratio and better battery life than previous iPhones, with the speed of an iPad, in a physically smaller space. Given that everything has been improved, it's clearly not much of a tradeoff.

FYI, iOS is perfectly capable of running applications designed for other resolutions. It's not for lack of 'flexibility' on the operating system's part that Apple chose not to utilize intermediate resolutions for its hardware.

It's also a little strange to see Android phones' variety of resolutions being described as some sort of path that Android has trailblazed. For one thing, the operating system has nothing to do with it, and for another, that sort of thing has been standard practice for a long time now, whether you're considering computers in general or even just mobile handsets.

I don't understand your point. The iPad has a 130 dpi display, if anything, it should be easier to double that than it was to double the iPhone 3GS's 160 dpi. (I know that making larger displays at that resolution is harder and more expensive, but that won't be an issue forever.)

I think the narrow DOF helps give laypeople a better sense of perspective and size. I'd rather see a high resolution showing of both head-on, but a shot like this does have a strong emotional aspect to it.

In other words, I guess it's just a more powerful photo.

Setting a new standard, that's for sure. Thank god you can't patent a simple increase in the number of pixels on a screen.