Ah, I get it now. I agree to a point. I'd add that once resolution itself is no longer an issue (because every phone's screen is above 300 dpi), Android still has the advantage of custom aspect ratios.

Regarding the iPad, marketing-wise, they might claim that people typically hold the iPad farther away from their eyes than 12 inches, say 15 inches, which places the "retina limit" conveniently just under 260 dpi.

>They've also marketed themselves into a corner

I think you're exaggerating their demise, as it were. iPhone competitors released phones with higher res screens. So what, the next release of the iPhone trounced them all. Now the competitors will release something better and Apple will respond, on and on.

The difference between a Smart phone and a normal phone is it's not as easy to dump your current phone and just move to another. The differences will have to be pretty big to get people to be willing to go through the trouble of learning a whole new phone, moving their data, etc. And I don't buy the carrier argument because from my experience all US carriers are awful.

And having custom resolutions isn't necessarily a win. Look at all the complaining about the different Android resolutions so far. Just wait until they get 5 or 6 new ones.