More Details on the iPhone 5 Touchscreen Come to Light Discussion

[Ryan Punzalan]

Apple has reportedly settled on a larger, 3.95-inch display for its upcoming smartphone. This will require a slight change in the resolution.

Read the full content of this Article: More Details on the iPhone 5 Touchscreen Come to Light

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[Varjak]

Funny. Someone (me) wrote something similar but was pooh-poohed by someone who questioned the change in screen resolution/aspect ratio. I guess it is not an insurmountable problem.

[Mitlov]

I really like 16:9 for both laptops and touchscreens, and I think it makes sense to have as much stuff the same aspect ratio as possible. Minimizes the times you run into black bars on the top and bottom of things. Apple has historically avoided the 16:9 ratio (for example, using 4:3 for the iPad and 16:10 for the MBP), but I could see them grudgingly coming around. For phones in particular it just makes sense so it's easy to hold in one hand. And Apple has caved in certain other markets to using 16:9 (iMac, MBA 11).

[Drillbit]

You change the aspect ratio, you are going to have to rewrite apps. That's plain and simple.

If you are going to change aspect ratio, mainly keep the width and increase the height of the screen, apps are going to run with black space on top where the extra resolution falls. You're still effectively on a 3.5" screen unless the apps have to be rewritten for the aspect ratio. That in effect is already screen fragmentation.

[Ed Hardy]

If this scenario turns out to be correct, it's possible Apple will come up with something clever to do with the otherwise blank space on older apps that haven't been modified. On the other hand, when the iPad is running iPhone apps, the extra space is just left black.

My guess is the App Store won't approve new or updated software that doesn't support both aspect ratios. That's the club Apple will wield to make developers support both, greatly reducing fragmentation.

[Varjak]

As explained above twice, you can just insert a blank area without rewriting the program. Plus, I don't think adapting the program is really that difficult, especially as they don't map it pixel-to-pixel but use a formula to accomplish it. I think Ed covered it pretty well.