How sharp is the iPhone 4's screen? High Res 4 vs 3GS images

Gameboys are nigh onto indestructible, so that's a bad example.

I don't know; people were pretty excited about the AMOLED screen. The excitement was tempered, however, by the fact that it's useless in daylight. Also, people liked the industrial design of the Droid. Take this quote from Engadget's review: "an industrial design straight from a gadget enthusiast's fever-dream"; and this: "they've made a device which is truly lustworthy, even next to the best efforts of Apple, HTC, and Palm."

I was told that the display of the Nexus One is not so great, with problems like oversaturation and bad color reproduction : http://www.displaymate.com/Nexus_iPhone_ShootOut.htm

(this is from the same guy who criticized Jobs for his presentation of the iPhone 4 display)

I have a Nexus One. The screen is really nice, I like it. But it does suck outdoors. Probably not a winner for most consumers.

It was widely praised for that. Everywhere! Enthusiastically! Just because you talked to some people who are obviously idiots …

Yes, precisely. I can't visually resolve pixels on my 42" 52 PPI TV at a normal viewing distance. I can't resolve pixels on my Nexus One at my normal operating distance unless I look really hard (252 PPI), but I tend to hold it ~12-18 inches away.

Of course, but the 10-12 inches they quote as normal operating distance is pretty reasonable as far as I'm concerned. So while clever marketing, I wouldn't call it false advertising.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner. Clever marketing. If you're wondering why people care so much, it's the MARKETING! I bet if I asked 10 non-geeks what a Nexus One was, at least half would have no idea what I'm talking about.

Hey. You seem like a pretty smart guy. Throughout your comments on this thread, though, you've demonstrated a level of condescension, arrogance, and rudeness that is inappropriate for civil dialog between people (see also your comment elsewhere, "the ignorance is incredible"). Your intelligent input would be valued much more highly were you able to rephrase your commentary to show respect for others, even if you know they are wrong.

See http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ; specifically, the first two lines under the subheading In Comments.

Well, it is certainly easier for devs that they pixel doubled, but I don't think the resolution is hyperbole, see: http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/r...

insulting?

That's what tripods are for.

And after you paid that you'd pay half as much again for the four graphics cards you'd need to display information on it at a decent framerate. :P

That's 41,600,000 pixels.

My 24" display, at 1920x1200 (~86 PPI) is 2,304,000 pixels, and even with a moderately high end graphics card, it struggles under load. You're talking about a display with 18x as many pixels to paint (or, to put it in a metric more easily graspable, it'd be like running ~18 displays at 1920x1200 @ 86 DPI, across which a single frame would be painted.

Needless to say, I don't think that technology is going to be showing up in stores near us in the next year or two. :)

The cost is measured in number of dead pixels. On a 4" screen, it's easy to avoid dead pixels. On a 30" screen... not so much.

IBM used to make a 22inch 3840×2400 which was 204 DPI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

Despite your desires, at some point, those pixels will become too small for you to see at normal viewing range. They'd be a waste, you have 20-10 vision, or you'll be sitting far too close

That's genuinely very very impressive.

I think all the web commentary about whether the pixels are visible or not are missing the point. The point is that thinks that were not readable (or resolvable) now are. For instance on the NYT page, on the 3gs screenshot only the main headlines are readable. On the 4 phone, everything is. That's a huge usability improvement. Additionally a number of the stylist elements on the iphone don't look that great at lower resolution but amazing at the higher one. The obvious one is the inset text effect used for the browser header (i.e. the white inset on text),it almost looks like ghosting on the 3gs whilst on the 4 it looks like a crisp inset. The same goes for the inset icons at the bottom. I have to look hard to see pixels on my 3gs; things looking less pixely isn't the news, things being more resolvable is.

Thank you for this.

Photographing screens is pretty meaningless. If you look at the palm holding the phone in the original post, it is much better visible on the 4 picture than on 3GS, with papillary lines and everything. How can someone claim these pictures allow you to compare the quality of displays is beyond me.

Winners: us.

  Your definition of trade-off seems broken. If I can make a car much bigger,
  or make it much more fuel efficient then that's still a trade-off even if I
  decide to make it a little bit bigger and a little bit more fuel efficient.

There's nothing wrong with my definition of a trade-off. What you're pointing out here is that all design inherently involves trade-offs, which is just a simple fact. Your previous post, however, makes the FUDdy suggestion that people are going to get something worse than before ("I believe smaller pixels means less light gets through, it's more work for your processors which means less battery life etc.")

I guess it's possible that when you talked about "less light" and "less battery life", you were speaking in reference to theoretical maximums which Apple could have chosen to individually pursue at the expense of all other factors, as opposed to the display quality and battery life of existing phones. In which case, you were simply stating a practical fact and not offering a criticism. But it sure doesn't sound that way.

  They are of course making lemonade from this particular lemon via marketing
  in an attempt to counteract the benefit that rivals will receive by choosing
  the screen with the best balance of quality/price/battery at any particular
  point in time for their devices.

Where and what are those devices?

  let's shout this metric from the rooftops because as any longtime Apple
  follower (like myself) knows, it's only "about the total experience" when
  you can't actually beat them on the raw figures.

You'll notice Apple continues to emphasize the experience here, which is why they bothered to talk about human optics rather than simply dumping the 326 ppi figure and moving on. And sure, they like to brag about specs when they can, but it's the fact that they're fundamentally about the total experience that gives them the highest customer satisfaction ratings.

  If you happen to be forced to use a spec that by your own marketing is higher
  than actually necessary or visible most of the time, then that figure becomes
  vitally important since no-one even wants to match it because they want to
  focus on the "total experience" rather than chase your metric.

Nobody was forced to do anything. 960x640 was a particularly convenient choice for two reasons: it allowed them to have maximally sharp text and images, while sidestepping problems that arise with scaling apps for previous devices by non-integer values.

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.