iPhone 5 Will Be Taller, Have 4 Inch Screen
There are a lot of iPhone 5 rumors circulating online (we have certainly reported on a number of them here at the Inquisitr) and it is sometimes hard to tell truth from fiction. This is especially true when dealing with Apple, which zealously maintains its secrecy.
The Inquisitr has previously reported on rumors that the next-generation iPhone, the tentatively named iPhone 5, will feature a larger screen to match those of the leading Android devices. Now those rumors have a little more meat to them, given recent developments in Apple’s iPad line of tablet computers.
The new iPad features an LTE radio for high speed internet, which seems to indicate that Apple has hopped onto the 4G bandwagon. This is why the newest iPad from Cupertino actually weighs in heavier than the iPad 2 and is slightly, yet not noticeably, thicker.
There doesn’t seem much of a chance that Apple will stop at adding 4G to its tablets while forgoing the iPhone, its flagship product, and the inclusion of LTE is in itself the surest sign that the handset’s screen will grow in its next iteration.
Wired’s GadgetLab blog summarized the latest thinkingby Apple fanblog iLounge as follows: “It all comes down to LTE. LTE radios take up more room in a smartphone than 3G radios and use more power. To put LTE capabilities in the next iPhone, you need to make room not just for the radio, but find enough juice to power it without significantly decreasing battery life.”
“The problem is there’s just not a lot of room inside an iPhone for anything more than is already there…Over the past five generations, Apple has packed in everything that makes up an iPhone about as densely as possible…If it’s going to fit anything else, Apple needs to make more room.”
In order to maintain current levels of battery life and make space to include the electricity gulping LTE radio, the iPhone is going to have to get bigger in some way.
Reported Wired:
There’s been a lot of talk over the last couple of years that with the iPhone 5, Apple would bump the display up to a larger four inches, but the rumor’s always had a lot of problems. Increasing the iPhone’s display while maintaining its current 3:2 aspect ratio would make the device wider in the hand and harder to operate one-handed. It would also either decrease the pixel density of the iPhone’s Retina display, making it less “retina-ey” and more jaggy to the eyes, or require more pixels per inch to compensate, causing iPhone developers to design their apps for multiple resolutions (the exact same kind of fragmentation problem that’s bitten Android on its ass). No good.
That’s why conventional wisdom (until a couple months ago) was that Apple would keep a 3.5-inch display and eschew LTE until the radios were sufficiently small and power-efficient to fit into the current iPhone’s form factor. But with the new iPad’s WiFi + 4G release, Apple has made it abundantly clear that it is finally ready to embrace LTE. And the way the company is going to do it is by making the iPhone’s display longer, but not wider.
The next-gen iPhone, claims iLounge, will also feature a smaller dock connecter, making your 3rd party accessories obsolete. Let’s hope that one isn’t true.
