“For Apple to produce an LTE iPhone, they would need to increase the physical footprint of the device, may be not significantly but an increase nonetheless. This is something I feel Apple simply won’t do, they hit the sweet spot with the physical size of the original iPhone and have not strayed far from those initial dimensions since,” modilwar writes for The Verge.
“Last week, while watching the Vergecast episode 24, came the Eureka moment. A caller named Colin (apologies if I got your name wrong) mentioned how he thought apple could increase the iPhone screen size without effecting the external form factor or pixel density,” modilwar writes. “Change the aspect ratio.”
“Colin’s idea was to keep the shorter side of the iPhones screen the same, i.e. 640 pixels at 1.94 inches. With that in mind how much would the longer side need to increase so the that diagonal measurement was 4 inches. The answer, derived using simple algebraic rearrangement of Pythagorus’s theorem, 1152 pixels and 3.49 inches. That leaves the the diagonal length measuring a little over 3.99 inches, I’m sure Apple PR could round this 4,” modilwar writes. “For those of you who are good with numbers I’m sure you’ve noted that 1152 x 640 has an aspect ratio of 9:5 and the 1152 pixels is and increase of 192 from 960 and that’s 20% more than on the iPhone 4 and 4S.”
modular writes, “But how will iOS cope with the change in dimension and increase in pixels? Well the answer is actually more simple than you might think.”
<Much more in the full article, including screenshots and mockups, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Andrew Wolniak” for the heads up.]
Me & Woz will be first in line for this.
Nope. You’d find some “major flaw” with it and spend your time blasting Apple.
Yep. I expect him to say that Apple blew it and that they should have made the screen 4.5 or 5 inches. He’s a size queen, and size queens are never satisfied.
Right you are, HTML5 Gordon!
Woz and I…..
But wouldn’t it lose its 4:3 aspect ratio and become wide screen like Android phones and tablets?
I think the iPhone’s aspect ration is 3:2.
Oh yeah, my bad. I’m thinking about the iPad.
MDN needs to stop publishing this sort of drivel every day. the argument this guy makes is never going to happen! tradeoff of re-engineering apps to take advantage of 192 new pixels simply isn’t worth it…especially when it’s already a “retina” display and pixel density is already greater than human eye can discern.
It’ll have to run Flash, though, for it to really catch on and be successful as a true smartphone. Otherwise, this new gadget will be nothing more than a short-lived fad.
Could really use a physical keyboard too – otherwise its’ not a very good e-mail machine.
It’d be a flash in the pan and they’d call it the iFad.
ZuneTang, you’re back! We missed you so. Do share more of your crafty insights with us.
Zune Tang…eat shyte and die. Or go away, whichever works.
It doesn’t matter anyway, if you can’t replace the battery, you’d need to throw it away when it dies.
So if you have to make the device bigger to accommodate the LTE and bigger battery then what is the point of increasing the screen size to 4 inches without changing the external dimensions?
I digress …
“For Apple to produce an LTE iPhone, they would need to increase the physical footprint of the device, may be not significantly but an increase nonetheless.”
In a word: Bull!
If Apple goes with 28 nm chips (or better yet, 22 nm chips) then the LTE can easily fit within the current 4/4S form factor and still have plenty of battery life.
And anyone telling you that an LTE phone has to be bigger *just because of LTE* (ignoring battery & chip feature sizes, etc.) does not know anything about what they are saying or they are intentionally lying.
I can’t imagine Apple shipping the next generation iPhone with LTE and base the chips on 45 nm feature sizes. That would be truly asinine and would require a bigger phone.
Additionally, changing the aspect ratio and/or the screen resolution by anything other than integer factors will put a significant strain on the graphics processor. Not likely to happen until the iPhone of 2013 at the earliest.
4G means bigger battery so it would make sense to make the iPhone 5 bigger for the battery regardless of the chip being used.
I think most agree that a bigger screen iPhone is good but not necessarily a bigger iPhone. Apple was careful in not making the new iPad much bigger but people did notice the difference.
Personally, I don’t care for 4G. I wish the iPad wasn’t only 4G and i hope the next iPhone isn’t only 4G.
It means better battery, not bigger (think iPad 3)
I believe the battery in the new iPad is a lot bigger than its predecessors.
80% larger capacity in terms of mAh than the iPad 2. And, yet, the current limit for USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 is 1A. That demonstrates the lack of vision of the people who crafted the USB spec. FireWire can carry more current.
So dumb.
Actually, I was suggesting changing aspect ratio already year ago (from 3:2 to 16:9). That would make 4″ screen without changing physical size of device. Not sure if Apple will do this, though; lets see.
“Personally, I don’t care for 4G. I wish the iPad wasn’t only 4G and i hope the next iPhone isn’t only 4G.”
Only 4G? How d’you work that out? It works on Edge and 3G, which is good, as there’s no 4G in the UK.
Guess it’s time for me to rewrite that old article where I said that I know as a fact that the next iPhone will be shaped like a baseball.
How bout an iPhone that I can fold like a piece of paper and throw it in my pocket then unfold it when I need it?? Lol these articles are so crazy!
can we just stop, already? I don’t WANT a frickin’ larger iPhone.
As explained here a while ago, a 4″ display with a 1080 x 720 resolution (same aspect ratio & same density as the retina display found in the iPhone 4/4S) makes much more sense…:
http://www.kybervision.com/Blog/files/iPhone5_RetinaDisplay.html
I can do simple math, too, and 1152×640 is an aspect ratio of 1.8, which is even slightly more elongated than the HDTV aspect ration of 16:9. Apple is currently using established display resolution standards for all of its devices, and 1152×640 does not match any standard display resolution that I could find for aspect ratios of 5:4 (1.25), 4:3 (1.3), 3:2 (1.5), 16:10 (1.6), 5:3 (1.67), or 16:9 (1.78).
In short, GIGO. The author’s simple math is matched by overly simple thinking. Apple would not do something so bizarre for so little advantage.