How about making batteries that can make your phone run for more that 8 hours straight now? I'd buy the phone that would give me a week of uptime (and that is not a 3310).
Now that we have gorgeous displays, I'd like to see manufacturers compete over a new metric: Smallest Total Bezel Area.
The bezels on all phones today are just too damn big. The top bezel should not be taller than ~6mm (enough for speaker, camera and sensors) and the bottom should not be more than 4mm (enough to round the phone) and the side bezels should basically not exist at all.
The bevel could be virtual - painted on by the OS or application but not accepting touch inputs. Perhaps even custom to the user preferences. It could go away for certain uses cases, like full screen video. It could even have function buttons rendered on it that are context dependent.
Sure, this might work. But the extra pixels needed for the bezel will consume battery with current technology. Also, a new kind of proximity sensor have to be developed for these use cases. It will be really annoying to set the virtual bezel manually all the time.
Photographs and magazines are full-bleed, but we don't mind it. As long as the device is smart about ignoring perimeter touches, I wouldn't be surprised if in the future our phones are full bleed with speakers and cameras hidden behind the display.
There is a concern about unwanted touches being registered if the bezel is too small, but the interface and screen controller could probably be adapted to minimize this.
For the longest time, operating systems didn't really work in High DPI. At Apple, a lot of the designs relied on pixel art, and scaling it looked terrible. There are breadcrumbs for scaling in OS X that date back to Tiger or Leopard.
This is one of the reasons why the iPhone4 straight up doubled the resolution even though it made for kind of a wacky display resolution (as opposed to 1024x600 or something more standard like that)
Mountain Lion is supposed to finally get all that HighDPI stuff right though, according to the rumors.
I'm only really familiar with the Apple side of things though, maybe Metro has similar design considerations in mind.
For the longest time, operating systems didn't really work in High DPI.
Back in 2000 I was using 1920x1200 on a 12" laptop. I was running both WinXP and some version of Ubuntu, and they looked fine. Every since then I've had WUXGA screens and displays, until very recently when Dell and Lenovo decided to bail and move to the 1920x1080 short screens.
I think your definition of 'looked fine' is a lot different than Steve Jobs' and people who need bifocals.
My guess is that your task bar in XP must have been less than a centimeter tall, the system font less than a millimeter tall. I know there are a lot of people like you who value having more on the screen like that, but realistically, that's not a very large market niche.
The goal at Apple was to keep roughly the same dimensions for interface elements while increasing the sharpness of text and icons. If the user wanted to, they could reduce the font size in whatever application they were using to make practical use of the increased pixel density.
Yield, if I had to guess. Manufacturing a 24" 16:9 300dpi screen would lead to a resolution of around 6259x3543. Now consider the manufacturing waste due to defective pixels in existing screens at current resolutions, raise that rate by a few orders of magnitude to account for the need to fit more pixels of a higher density (== increased defect rate by itself) in the same physical surface area (== increased chance of a single piece of substrate containing too many defective pixels).
Finally, consider the power consumption of the 3D card required to drive a modern game natively at this resolution
Seven years ago I bought a Dell 30" with 2560x1600 resolution for about $1500. Today the biggest monitor I can find is still the same 30" at $1500. What the hell?
Maybe you haven't been looking hard enough? I've been using HP's 27"2560x1440 for months hooking up to my lowly macbook air 11. Cost ~$660, worth every cent (for comparison, brought the first Dell 24"1920 display when it first came out for ~$1k).
For laptops, the (pretty strong) rumor is that new macbook pros coming out in summer will be much higher res, potentially up to double current resolutions.
For current laptops, the macbook airs and similar PCs currently have the highest "usable" resolutions. The sony vaio z and p has the highest resolutions.
Unfortunately, you have to look pretty hard. The HP, a Dell, and Apple's Thunderbolt Display are the only three proper 27" displays on the market apart from some significantly higher-priced options. Nearly everything else from every manufacturer is one-size-fits-all 1080p, your only choice being how big the pixels are.
Interestingly, there were some cheap Korean 27" 2560x1440 displays that came to prominence recently, mainly because they were originally selling for ~$370. The panels themselves are the same as those in the 27" Apple and Dell displays, just ones that didn't meet Apple and Dell's requirements.
You can search for "Yamasaki Catleap", if you're curious about it.
Interesting, never heard of them. Reviews on Amazon consist of two "I can't believe I got this for half the price of a Cinema Display" and one "handful of problems but too much trouble to send it back to Korea." Not terrible odds, I suppose.
At 440ppi, this seems like overkill, considering someone with 20/20 vision only needs around 300ppi for things to be acceptable.
I was hoping with the retina marketing blitz, Apple would put the density comparisons to bed and we could start thinking about displays with wider colour gamuts, wider viewing angles, better outdoors performance, 3D, mini projectors, etc.
I understand hard numbers like ppi are easier to compare between and display in huge letters in a BestBuy flyer, we called them 'checkbox features' at a place I used to work at, but at some point they distort the overall quality of the product. For example, the Pentium 4's clockrate and megapixel ratings on cameras are cases of a checkbox feature actually decreasing the quality of most products in the market.
Interestingly, in high-end printing, 300 dpi is considered unacceptably poor, most print shops will simply refuse to print artwork at 300 dpi. 600 dpi is usually what's considered minimally acceptable for artwork and around 1200 dpi for lots of text.
DPI is very different though, a screen sub pixel can vary in luminescence (typically index in most displays with 6bits of accuracy, minus crappy colour gamut on the display) whereas a printed dot is limited to the ink colours used.
Some printers overlap dots, print thicker dots, and have other tricks to work around this aspect. I don't know as much about this area, I've worked mostly in graphics, but my understanding is that because the colour gamut for each printed 'pixel' is less expressive, you need more dots in the same area to get a similar result.
Furthermore, dpi expresses printed 'dots' whereas a pixel on most displays can be considered three fixed 'dots', one for each display channel. Although lately, some LCD substrates are cheating a little and displaying only 2 subchannels per pixel.
Anyways, that's everything I know about dpi, as I said, I'm more versed in video rather than printing. So take this with a grain of salt: I think you need to multiply PPI by 3 to get DPI, ignoring cleverness on the part of either display or printer manufacturers.
For example in full-color (4 color) printing you essentially need 4 dots (halftones) to make any color. However, they aren't all necessarily lined up in a grid like pixels (it's an analogue medium). But simply dividing 1200 dpi by 4 doesn't really provide a correct calculation for the resolution at the end.
And then you actually get into measuring with LPI (lines per inch) which can easily go above 300 for things like good magazines (though around 130-150 is more typical). 130-150 is actually around the retina display's 300dpi (a good conversion estimate is that 1LPI=2DPI but some will go as high as 3DPI).
Black and white (non-process) printing can be very different and uses solid colors. Higher quality artwork is necessary for this. That's where the 1200dpi comes into play. Fine books, black and white artwork, etc. need artwork at 1200dpi and the LPI can easily go above 500.
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