It amazes me how the Reality Distortion Field is strong. The Droid came with a 265 ppi screen and very few people cared (maybe http://xkcd.com/662 ). I googled around and could not find people taking pictures to compare the Droid screen with the iPhone 3GS screen.
(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.)
If anything, this seems to be how there's a void of real game-changing things on the iPhone 4, and yet bloggers and the writers who depend on Apple hype are working much harder to find anything to sell.
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 note elsewhere in the thread that high pixel density is something I feel Apple was forced into by their business model, then marketed very strongly as a must-have feature.
I've felt the same about their one-piece aluminium enclosures and their new unbreakable glass designs.
Again, durability is great, if it came for free then I'd take it, but you're going further and telling me that all the cameras, gameboys, walkmen, cell phones, PDAs, netbooks etc. that I ever owned were never "mainstream" because of some Apple marketing that doesn't even apply to the 100 million plus portable devices they themselves sold over the last few years. It just doesn't add up. There's nothing inherently wrong with plastic or rubber devices, Apple just doesn't like the associations. They'd rather have titanium that flakes off than plastic that didn't.
Nigh on indestructible plastic. Beige plastic at that. Which makes it a good example of the point that you don't need to accept Apple aesthetics to make durable and/or highly popular products.
No, I was pointing out that this wasn't something that was invented by Apple and revealed to the world last month and wasn't incompatible with plastic, a key component of basically all the portable devices I listed.
The post I responded to called a phone "cheap plastic" as if this was somehow unusual, and a fatal flaw, yet my iPhone has a plastic back and seems to be doing fine in durability and popularity.
The original iPhone (the 2g) was the most durable, but Apple went and changed the design after that to materials that were much less durable. I work in this area (within Apple) so I'm in a good position to judge.
I have the original iPhone 2g covered in dents and scratches (from the previous owner mainly, it's second hand) yet I know it's never gonna badly dent, and will never crack from regular drops and general wear and tear.
Incidentally, the iPhone 4g has benn drop tested, and the results aren't good. So much for Apple's much vaunted durability:
There's a difference between cheap plastic and durable plastic though. There are tons of different plastic grades. I usually think of the phrase "cheap plastic" referring to, y'know, cheap plastic.
"Cheap" in this instance was clearly meant pejoratively, not descriptively. Replacing it with "inexpensive", "economical" or "low-cost" doesn't really fit. Replacing it with "tacky", "trashy", "bum", "chintzy", "crummy", "punk" or similar from your thesaurus clearly fits the meaning intended.
And that's all premised on the fact that this plastic casing is even cheap, which we clearly don't actually know. How do we know they didn't try and get fancy with their material selection or manufacturing (like Apple often does) and then blow it (like Apple often does). Did the plastic in the G4 cube have cracks because it was "cheap"? Did the white MacBook suffer discoloration because the plastic was "cheap"? No, someone or something messed up and even with fancy engineers and fancy plastics it wasn't caught in time. Assuming the Droid even has such issues, I'd guess the same cause.
I never noticed the difference in perspective you are talking about, but still: what about the screen from the Nexus One? Same resolution as the Droid, ~250 ppi and AMOLED. Yeah, one can find "Oh, shiny!" articles about it, but no one wanted to turn that into a absolutely remarkable feature.
As for the Droid quality: I bought mine in November and it's still going. Dropped it a couple of times (what caused a tiny crack on the corner, can't even see it if I don't point it out) and the keyboard "right-alt" key forces me sometimes to press it twice. I wouldn't say that the phone will outlive me, but it is far from being a "cheap plastic gizmo".
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."
Speaking as a Nexus One owner, it's not quite useless, it's just harder to use. Froyo's automatic brightness adjustment makes it quite usable in direct sunlight, though it's obviously not going to compete with an LCD. However, the display is just beyond gorgeous, and given that I work very hard to stay _out_ of the sun, it's a great fit for me.
17) The reflective screen works really well in direct sunlight. You lose colours, but you can always see what's on it, regardless of the lighting conditions.
The difference between a Nexus and a 3gs is way bigger than between a iphone 4 and a nexus. I remember telling lots of iPhone folks how much difference it made to have such high resolution on the N1 and they all said "meh ... it's good enough, who cares to have more?" Now it seems to be the only thing that matters ...
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.
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.
>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.
Ugh. Tell me you don't actually believe that?
The resolution of the iPhone 4 was predetermined to simply pixel-double existing iPhone applications (no sloppy scaling or black-bordered apps for the legacy stockpile). It is only marginally denser than several Android phones, and is a big ball of WGAF wrapped in ridiculous market speak.
It's great that they increased the resolution to be more competitive with most other high end smartphones, but the retina stuff is such a stretch of nonsense.
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.
What indication do you have that this person is "pretty smart"? They are obviously blinded by Apple hate and spewing nonsense that's been rebutted in this thread.
A "pretty smart" person would be happy that iPhone has on-upped all the competitors. Does the GP think that e.g. Android is going to say "well darn, looks like they made something better. Time to quit"? Of course they will come out with something to compete. As someone said elsewhere in the thread: this is a win for us. We should be happy that iPhone is pushing the envelope just as we should be happy that they changed the game to begin with. You don't have to like them or use them to benefit from their technology.
>They are obviously blinded by Apple hate and spewing nonsense that's been rebutted in this thread.
Does this make you feel smart?
I don't hate Apple at all. What I do hate, however, is when reality is rewritten, North Korea style, to favor Apple's great stewardship. It is an incredible offense to anyone with any common sense or actual knowledge.
But hey, did you hear that the iPhone invented video calling? It's the first to do it right. Am I right?
>Does this make you feel smart? I don't hate Apple at all. What I do hate, however, is when reality is rewritten, North Korea style, to favor Apple's great stewardship.
A little disgusted actually. But the fact is reality hasn't been rewritten, as has been pointed out to you several times in this thread. It is obviously your own personal bias that is clouding your judgment. Either that or you have no idea what you're talking about.
>But hey, did you hear that the iPhone invented video calling? It's the first to do it right. Am I right?
No, the video calling part was mostly bogus. I would say it is completely false, except I'm not sure if the others have literally no setup in the optimal case (in this case, iphone 4 to iphone 4 with both on wifi connections).
> (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.
It would be nice if he had taken it straight on, or at least with a narrow enough aperture to capture the whole screen in the DOF. What's the point of the picture if most of the screen is out of focus?
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.
I'm a photographer, so I understand the point of the shot as it is, emotional draw and all, but if the point of his article is to show the resolution, it's the wrong shot to use.
As a 30 inch Cinema Display owner, I did the math on it the other day, I think it's about 8000x5200 pixels at 326 ppi. I would pay whatever the cost for that.
For me, the real killer app of that sort of resolution would be resolution independence: current flat screens look crappy when you switch them to a non-native resolution, whereas with that sort of PPI you could get away with it - and you wouldn't even need a powerful graphics card, because the screen could appear as a lower resolution device to the system.
Actually, I think the screen tech is already there and it's really the terrible scaling support in OSes that is holding things back. Nobody buys high DPI displays because the experience of using one with Windows sucks. If it's true that iOS 4 automatically scales apps while improving text sharpness that will make it far more advanced than both Windows and Mac OS.
If you have nothing useful to add to the conversation, please continue to ignore these topics. I can only assume you believe that the DPI controls in OS X and Windows are actually useful, and to that I would say: have you ever actually tried to use them?
The iOS DPI controls are some of the most shockingly rudimentary and backwards of virtually any contemporary system, which is exactly why they simply doubled each axis' pixel count (then inventing some asinine "retina display" nonsense to try to make lemonade out of the teeny screen size in the face of better equipped competitors). To see someone calling it a model to strive to is simply shocking, especially on a generally more knowledgeable site like HN.
Windows has been dealing with resolution variance to much greater success since the early 90s. Seriously, by your claim, Windows XP would have been a revolution had it come with the new ability to target both QVGA and the exclusive new VGA functionality.
The iOS DPI controls are the simplest and most straightforward of any contemporary system, which is why they will likely actually work, in contrast to the OS X and Windows DPI controls which have never worked and likely will never work. I call that more advanced.
You are confusing resolution and DPI. Windows has been dealing with DPI variance by completely ignoring it since the early 90s, with the result that the physical size of interface elements varies with your screen's DPI, and high DPI displays are impractical. iOS doesn't have the option of ignoring DPI because in a touch interface the physical size of interface elements actually matters.
>The iOS DPI controls are the simplest and most straightforward of any contemporary system
But they're simple because it was a startling realization that the original design was shortsighted. The iOS platform has had a mere 3 screen attributes thus far, and each has been an essentially hard-coded hack specific for it.
It is not a laudable goal. They certainly didn't spearhead density-independent layout (and are more accurately one of the last to the party).
>and high DPI displays are impractical
In the workstation world people generally essentially placed their display based upon its DPI. A large, lower DPI display was wall mounted or placed at a greater distance (but serving more people), while a higher DPI display came closer to the user.
The iOS platform is not the best example of density-independent layout. It is one of the worst among the modern era.
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. :)
Black dead pixels cost nothing, but dead subpixels, or pixels stuck to displaying colour are very bad.
Even if adding more resolution makes you unable to resolve the pixels, you can still always see light, in the same way you have no hope to resolve stars, but you can clearly see their light.
Luckily once we get oled, it no longer matters, because there is no backlight and you can always set misbehaving pixels to black.
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
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.
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.
The people that have the benefit of using the technology, no matter whether it's Android or Apple. Competition is driving manufacturers to produce higher-spec devices in the hopes of winning customers. The iPhone languished at 320×480 for a long while (and really, I'll betcha Apple would have loved to keep it there, as a lower-resolution display takes less battery power to drive, and produces higher framerates in games, etc), and then all of a sudden, Android devices with shiny high-res displays started showing up, and Apple was compelled to counter with its own offering.
No doubt. Perhaps the wrong choice of word, but what I meant is that Apple wasn't pushing higher-res displays, despite advancements in display technology, until their competition did. They were content to let the iPhone stay at a relatively low resolution until it became a point that they had to compete on.
I disagree. If it's Jobs driving things (and he is), he'd be pushing for as high a resolution as they could afford in their power and dollar budgets; he's always been a typophile. It's only at this point that it has become generally feasible. (Yes, Android beat them by a few months, but such are the technology cycles. Apple started the iPhone 4 development 18 months ago, according to what was said at WWDC.)
This suffers the same issue as Apple's demo site that shows the iPhone 3GS screens blown up 2x to compare against the iPhone 4 screenshots.
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.
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.
Everyone knows why Apple doubled ppi and quadrupled pixel count. The benefits of this system over, say, Androids flexibility should be apparent. But there are also limitations that mean the iPad is unlikely to increase its DPI for years unless it follows Android's lead. Certainly not a clear win.
> 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.
Your definition of trade-off seems broken. If I can make a car much bigger, or make it much more fuel efficient because I've got a new lightweight alloy body 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.
I personally think they've been forced to overshoot on screen density in return for platform homogeneity, the much lesser discussed cousin of the ever popular "fragmentation" and this will cost them money, performance and battery life. 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.
Follow the pattern: processor speed: no comment (i.e. the same as everyone else, soon to be lower as new models are released), memory: no comment (i.e. half the flagship rivals, same as the rest), screen density: 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. 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.
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.
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.)
You've grasped my point better than you realize. As you say the larger screen size and number of pixels outweighs the smaller pixel density.
This does change over time but that's also my point, more heterogeneous rivals can re-purpose various display sizes as required and as time passes they'll get higher res screens before the iPad, just like various iPhone rivals did.
They've also marketed themselves into a corner since even if they double the 130dpi screen they'll not reach their "magical" figure of 300dpi, and they've now introduced pixel density as a marketable commodity in one market, when they're at a disadvantage in another.
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.
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.
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.
I'd also be happy with this. Considering that Apple used to ship all their Powerbooks with IPS displays, but the market decided that TN would rule the day.
Now the only places to find them are extremely highend workstation laptops (aka. heavy, desktop portables)
iPad is partially marketed as a reading device, so larger resolutions are warranted. And doubling the resolution is quite clever trick as it makes scaling legacy apps much, much easier
would be interesting to compare to the Samsung Galaxy S (android phone) which has a 4" super amoled screen, Samsung claims theirs is better as contrast ratios etc are more important than the extra few pixels, but then again, of course they would say that.
I've worked with display walls before and trust me, even a one-pixel gap between displays is too distracting for any real use. Considering the tiny size of these pixels it would be impossible to get the screens that close together.
(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.)
If anything, this seems to be how there's a void of real game-changing things on the iPhone 4, and yet bloggers and the writers who depend on Apple hype are working much harder to find anything to sell.