Tag Archive for ‘The iPhone Blog’

Rene Ritchie regarding the images that Gizmodo Brazil published late last night:

Apple typically makes a new, lower storage version of the past year’s iPhone to keep selling alongside the new one at a US$99 price point. Last year that was the 8GB iPhone 3GS. This year, it’ll in all likelihood be the 8GB iPhone 4.

I wan’t at all surprised to see these images pop up all over the place. But, we need to remember that this is exactly what Rene says it is, a cheaper to manufacture version of the iPhone 4 that will be sold for $99 alongside the iPhone 5.

Rene Ritchie:

UI elements stay the same size so are as easy to hit as before, but because the change in pixels isn’t exactly double the art needs to be interpolated and so edges blur and you lose the crispness. For fast moving games or videos it won’t matter. For anything with line work, grids, borders, etc. it will matter a great deal. Stretched apps don’t look as good.

What do you do with a one-pixel-wide black line on a white background when the resolution is multiplied by 1.5? You can’t draw a half pixel line, so to keep the UI the same physical size, the set of pixels next to the black line has to become grey.

In other words, if Apple increases the iPad’s resolution without doubling it, iOS is going to get ugly.