FWIW... iPhone 6 5.5" and 4.7" mockups at life size IF viewed on iPad

An experiment just for fun...

Tap to enlarge the attached image (then hold down if you want to save it to Photos) on an iPad (9.7" models only!). Viewed full-screen on an iPad, this shows exactly what a 5.5" phablet screen is like.

(The rough shell around the screen is included for interest, but we don't know anything about that really. They may never even ship an iPhone 5.5" for all we know.)

(EDIT: See also MacAgnostic's 4.7" version below.)


NOTES:


1. The shell uses the most likely rumored dimensions I could dig up (UPDATED: 77mm wide x 157mm tall).

For comparison, look at the leaked 4.7" faceplate's bezels here. But two things would make that part's bezels bigger in real life:

a) That part is just the glass front, but case-maker mockups show the metal bulging out wider than the glass. You don't see the full device width from that part alone.

b) That glass window must be larger than 4.7" to accommodate the sunken black "margin" around every phone screen. With an actual screen installed, that dark margin would be there, making the bezel around the lit pixel area feel wider. (I've added that little margin to my mockup, but the size of it is pretty arbitrary. Ditto for the corner radius and speaker/cam holes I used: arbitrary. The home button is 10.9 mm which I think is the current size?)

Thus you could expect the bezels to look wider--as seen in my mockup--than the 4.7" faceplate photos make it seem.


2. The inset iPhone 5 screenshot (from iphoneaddict.fr) is NOT TRULY 4" IN SIZE. (The yellow outline is the true 4" size of the iPhone 5 line.) Rather, that's comparing a 640x1136 (iPhone 5 res) portion of the rumored 960x1704 screen that the iPhone 6 MIGHT have (1.5x both dimensions) according to some rumors. You can see the added real estate: two-and-a-quarter times the total pixel area of the iPhone 5 series (even if this screenshot doesn't do much with those extra pixels).

(As for 1920x1080p rumors, I don't buy it: you wouldn't see the difference, and it would burn needless battery life, RAM, storage space and speed. It's the kind of spec a shallow marketing-driven product might have.)

dlewis23 said:

This is totally wrong. We know it won't do any of that because 1920x1080 is pretty much the standard of every high end Android phone now. Also the iPad air has a higher resolution and does not burn ram, storage space, or speed. It uses the same A7 processor as in the iPhone 5s.

Click to expand...

Re Android: perfect example of 1080p being empty "bullet point marketing" with no perceptible benefit. (How else can Android makers compete with each other? They have too little control over the deep OS to innovate in software.) Don't expect Apple to follow that so-called "standard" from the TV world. It wouldn't fit their patterns, wouldn't benefit users of pocket devices, I surely hope they don't have to do it! I'd say they would only if it's the only component they can obtain. (Probably not the case.)

Re the Air: of course it does. It burns all of those--but at a real benefit since the image is large enough for those pixels to matter. You simply can't have your CPU and GPU process more pixels for the same power in the same amount of time, nor store them in the same RAM/SSD space. More pixels ALWAYS consumes more resources. Always. So they'd better count!

The iPad Air (and even Mini) has a MUCH larger battery than a phone.

As an example of why 1080p makes no sense (to anyone but sales staff on commission!) for a device around 5.5" (much less on smaller screens):

Look at the above image on an iPad, and examine the text in the 5.5" view. Looks about perfect, right? That's at the iPad's 264ppi. That would be only 713 pixels across--not even 720p.

But assume you'd hold a 5.5" phone closer to your face. As close as a 4" iPhone? Probably not, but maybe. 4" iPhones are 326ppi. At 5.5" that would make 880 pixels wide.

The rumored 960 pixels wide is even higher res than that. Bigger phone, yet smaller pixels: 356 ppi. That's already overkill, really. (But it's 1.5x the current iPhones, and that works out well mathematically for developers, while allowing decent scaling of apps that have not been updated for the new size.)

If 960 is already overkill (but plausible), 1080 surely is. That's 400ppi. Sounds nice in a marketing message... but doesn't really help your eyes.* 27% more pixels won't be seen. But they would impact battery, speed, and storage.

Whatever battery life, or game framerate, you're able to achieve with 1080p, you could obtain even better with a more practical ppi, and visually won't see a difference. If you want a quality image, look to other things like gamut, viewing angle, black level (matters in darkness--one of OLEDs few strengths), sunlight performance, ghosting/response, illumination consistency, and color accuracy (not "which screen turns photos the most garish").

(Reminds me of the camera "megapixel race" where people tout a catchy marketing number to promote cameras that take worse photos!)

* One case where extra high PPI will help the image: if the phone uses a cheap pentile matrix, where 1/3 of the subpixels are missing and individual pixels cannot display many colors. (This has been popular on Android devices.) Pentile devices have a "screen door" or "checkerboard" dither effect that is twice the size of the pixels, so shrinking everything would make for cleaner horizontal/vertical strokes and smoother colors. But instead of shrinking the pixels to hide the pentile effect, you could just use a real RGB matrix where every pixel can be every color. I shudder to think Apple would ever touch pentile!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattbuchanan/the-problem-with-pentile-displays-in-an-image

Just updated the image: added a purple outline for a 4.7" screen (shell not shown).

Big screen, or one-handed use? I don't know what I'd pick... but I hope we have both choices!

MacAgnostic said:

Here's one with and iPhone 5S and the iPhone 6 with 4.7" screen.

Click to expand...

Nicely done! Thanks.

I've added a link to your image in my OP, and updated the thread title to mention the 4.7 too.