behind the screen ? ok, so the touch screen would have a another function..
Now, how will people know that and more importantly, where to tap to active Touch ID ?
You need a physical button.
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How Apple Could Make the Move to 4.7" iPhone Displays
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behind the screen ? ok, so the touch screen would have a another function..
Now, how will people know that and more importantly, where to tap to active Touch ID ?
You need a physical button.
How do people know where to swipe and in which direction to unlock the phone? Easy, the display itself shows what to do with the "slide to unlock" widget. Assuming that embedding the sensor under the display is technologically doable the display itself can easily instruct the user about it. Also Apple is rumored to be investigating pressure-sensing in the display which would make the whole display capable of becoming a "physical button" (e.g. press the bottom area of the display to activate the TouchId sensor and unlock the phone if the fingerprint matches).
1280p (2272x1280) on a 4.7 inch screen would be 555ppi. a far cry from Apple's magic number of 326. Retina 2.0?
The size of the jailbreak community isn't big enough to warrant a flood of Cydia apps to mess up their ecosystem. iOS is built to be lite and power conservative. Android is 2.3X more resource intensive, I don't want that waste just to multitask.
Why though? Most people won't see any difference except in their battery life. My point is that there is nothing special about 1920x1080 abstracted from physical screen size. Its historical development in the market has nothing to do with screens the size of phones, but much bigger ones. For a decent sized sized TV in a living room, 1920x1080 is high enough that you can't see the pixels. In a cinema, you want a higher resolution, hence 4k, 8k etc.
Putting a 1080p screen on a 4.7" phone is odd, it's like trying to feed a baby the diet recommended for an adult, just because that's a standard?!
Rather than us adopt a bunch of fixed, holy resolutions, with no regard for the size and use of the device it's for, I'd much rather we agreed on a bunch of pixel densities. Like (makng this up), 400ppi for close devices, 300 for laptops, 200 for TVs, 100 for cinemas. Then we could cut everything from the same 4 sheets, production would be so much simpler
I sit 10 feet away from my TV, I don't sit 10 feet away from my phone. You most certainly can tell the difference between Apples paltry resolution and 1080P on a phone. I can only speak from personal experience of course but I definitely can tell and many others whom I know are also able to tell. Maybe you and the lot you spend time with can't... that's fine however even in this scenario with some who can tell and some who can't, the higher and industry standard resolution I might add, would satisfy everyone. I added that last bit in because being an industry standard resolution is also another strong reason to use 1080P and not some off random made up 1-off resolution. It would be easier for developers; especially game developers as many gfx objects can be reused instead of having to be resized and rescaled for cross platform games.
Additionally content that is made also uses the same industry standard resolutions; there is a reason standards exist... Apple doesn't scale it's content offerings to their odd resolutions either... So users have an odd resolution and Apples video content uses industry standard resolutions which mean that customers are left with a subpar experience of having letter boxes around everything they watch or double tap the screen to zoom the video but you miss all the stuff on the sides of what you're watching... if Apples main goal was customer experience this would not be the case.
It's like sleeping in a king bed after years of sleeping in a twin. Can not wait to sleep in peace!
That may be so, but it's also incredibly simple to use. Which, I guess, is why it's still there. You need someway to activate Siri, multitasking, etc., quickly, and in the case of the former, without looking at the screen, such as when driving.I guess the future won't arrive after all.
SJ was gunning to have that button removed ages ago btw. He hated it.
You don't need a depressible button for TouchID plain and simple.
Manufacturers like to keep buttons on devices even though you don't need them. I'm sure you've heard of planned obsolescence.
You may not need a "depressible button", but it needs some physical space. The home button was the ideal choice. Where else would they put it? The back of the device is definitely a no go.
How so? If that was the case, why wouldn't it already be embedded in the screen? Why wouldn't the competition have done the same?
You're not incorrect. However the next resolution would only need to be 1704x960 (568*3, 320*3) which would be 416 PPI at 4.7 inches. The question is whether or not that elements on screen would become too difficult to touch with a 22% reduction in size. I think it'd be all right.
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Games will always have to specifically decide what different resolutions mean to the UI of their game. Sometimes it could be a total non-factor, other times it might just mean scaling 3D models, and sometimes it might unfortunately mean new assets.
But from an auto-layout aspect, I'd image there must be a setting of "not applicable" that'd let them bypass my proposed requirement.
Apple could simply rationalise it as necessary to maintain backwards compatibility with existing apps, rather than trying to one-up the competition in terms of PPI (though I expect they will at least try to trump this higher resolution as well).
You realize Apple already has a patent on putting the touch ID behind the touch screen right? In this scenario they made the entire screen able to read your fingerprint and you can press anywhere for it to read...
I guess the future won't arrive after all.
SJ was gunning to have that button removed ages ago btw. He hated it.
You don't need a depressible button for TouchID plain and simple.
Manufacturers like to keep buttons on devices even though you don't need them. I'm sure you've heard of planned obsolescence.
Just because you don't think you need a depressible button doesn't mean you can get rid of it. You still need something there that is that size because you have to fit a finger on it.
Is that so? That may be the reason the competition doesn't do this (though, there may be another method of doing this to yet be discovered that isn't patented) however why wouldn't Apple do it if possible?
So many people will be confused by the removal of the home button. I would prefer none myself, but Apple targets the general market, not really the more tech savvy side of the market.
but Apple and all the fan boys said 3.5" is the perfect size
It was, it annoys me that I can reach the top of my iPhone 5/5S.
But you can't ignore the masses, even if the masses are generally wrong. You have to cater for the latest craze and thats bigger and bigger phones which look more and more stupid and fit less and less in your pocket.
In a decade it'll be all about trying to make the smallest phone possible again like it was in the early 2000's.
It's still trying to make the smallest phone possible compatible with the largest display possible.
Yes, it's good where it is. No it doest need to be depressible. It only needs to be capacitive. Like I said all companies favour Planned Obsolescence. Thus the archaic button.
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It is in my opinion the absolutely worst way (well, an un-alphabetized list or randomly scattered icons would be worse) of (barely) getting things done on a smartphone. It forces me to open an app for everything. Check weather, open app. Check email, open app. Check calendar, open app. Check news feeds, open one or more apps. Check social media feeds, open one or more apps.
The optimized way would be to "unlock device, glance at screen, put device back in pocket". Which is exactly what Android and WP allow you to do, yet they both let you use the static icon grid should that be your preference. Apple gives you the icon grid and the finger if you don't like it.
Validity Sensors (who just got bought by Synaptics, the trackpad people) also demonstrated an in-screen reader over a year ago.
Validity Sensors demonstrates screen-based fingerprint recognition at CES - Jan 2013
They do, but that only tells you that people like iPhones. Not that people like 4" phones in particular. There is no way to tell how many buy the iPhone despite it being being 4", how many buy it because it is compact yet powerful and how many buy it because it is an iPhone, and will continue to do so no matter what the future holds in store.
I can only say for certain that I am in the first group. The small screen (and high price) was a definite turn-off, but I wanted to try one nevertheless. Unless Apple does something about the screen size and makes sure that iOS actually does something useful with the extra real estate I'll probably just keep my iPhone 5 for personal use and get a Note 4 or some possible WP8.1 phablet for real use.
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I don't know if you are serious or not, but that money belongs to the shareholders, not Apple. Apple can't just start throwing it around or losing it. The shareholders will take what is theirs and go elsewhere with it if they lose faith in Apple.
Try comparing an iPhone 4/4s/5/5s/5c to something like an HTC One, and then open the desktop version of a web forum like this site on both phones. You'll definitely see the blockiness of the iPhones then.
Not backwards, we just see the problem differently.
I do see your point though. You are thinking that DPI must remain the same as a way to keep UI size the same, whereas I am thinking that resolution must remain the same (or 2x) to avoid fractional scaling of bitmapped graphics.
I was thinking that DPI is not that relevant as long as touch target size is no smaller than what is currently on the iPhone. (DPI ≤325)
If they simply scale the display size up without changing the resolution (or moving to 2x) all that happens is that items become larger and easier to use.
Keeping resolution the same and going from 4" to 4.7" would be similar to the difference in size between items displayed on an iPad and an iPad mini. (actually, the difference would be slightly less)
They clearly had no regard for keeping DPI the same when they released the iPad mini, as they kept the resolution the same (and thus increased the DPI) because touch targets--at least when following Apple's spec--should have remained similar to those on the iPhone.
Personally I find that many objects are too small on the mini though, as most app UI's were designed for the larger sized iPad.
With the changes that have been made to iOS to accommodate the iPhone 5, it does seem possible that the UI of newer apps could simply "reflow" to fill the screen if the resolution is increased. (rather than displaying 4x5 on the home screen, you could display 5x6 or increase the gap between icons, for example)
I don't know if the changes they made were simply to add an additional height row, or if they were more forward-thinking and would allow currently existing apps to reflow and fit most resolutions.
As long as the pixel density remains at or below 325 DPI, this would mean that they could increase the resolution as a way of providing more "workspace" without requiring the UI to be scaled - though it would mean that you have apps which don't fill the screen if they don't support this feature. (similar to iPhone 4 apps on an iPhone 5)
However, I don't see why a "4x" retina display is so infeasible. There is talk of 2560x1440 phones already.
A 4x retina display would be 2272x1280 - and that would look good with any size of phone.
Scaling is horribly blurry on the Retina MacBooks, text has to be displayed at 1x or 2x resolution to look sharp.
And scaling by small amounts is even worse - you need at least twice the resolution for scaling to look reasonable.
I have long said that Apple should have gone straight to 3x with Retina Displays, as those are about the point where you start to hit diminishing returns from further resolution increases.
However the problem is that current apps would be scaled up 1.5x which looks very bad--and you would not want to scale up non-retina resources 3x instead of scaling retina apps 1.5x, because that would look even worse.
While legacy apps already look rather bad today, current "2x" retina apps would look even worse than those on a device which used a "3x" retina display.
You're misunderstanding the problem. Text is always rendered at the native resolution of the screen when you do this. Increasing the size of the text will improve its appearance.
Try making the text smaller and you should notice how there is not enough resolution to do a high quality rendering. It is particularly obvious when browsing web pages that use Asian characters.
How is that an advantage?
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I think that game developers already know that, since I'd say that pretty much every PC game that I've ever played let's you choose between a pretty long list of resolutions. I think that what the game developers and designers would like, however, is that the iPhone would come in one of those resolutions as well so that they could reuse at least some of the existing elements.