iPad Mini 2 Getting Retina Display, Manufacturing Begins Soon

http://ismashphone.com/2012/11/report-ipad-mini-2-getting-retina-display-manufacturing-begins-soon.html


I guess that will be another mistake. Releasing it so soon after the latest launch that upset so many customers.

Given there also a rash of rumours in the press that the iPhone 5S will be out sometime after christmas, someone must have leant quite heavily on the 'Apple related [LIFTED] rumour' button this morning.

The reason they released the iPad 4 so soon after the iPad 3 was to shift the iPad release date from March to September. I suspect that's when we'll see the mini 2, along with the iPad 5.

Jon

The main job of the iPad 4 was also to harmonise the new connector. It would be silly to have one current device using the old port, and all the other devices to use the new one.

Then why not release the iPad mini as a retina device with a lightning connector from day one?

Does it need to be a retina device? To do so would require either the same pixel count as the full size iPad, or to have another set of pixel dimensions for the screen at the retina dot pitch. The latter would require another set of bitmaps in apps, which means apps would need to ship with three sets if bitmaps - one for each iPad variant. That's wasteful, and kicks off unnecessary app bloat.

Right now, as it's smaller and running at the same resolution as the original non retina iPads, developers need to nothing to their apps.

Not enough screens available to do it & they cost too much.
Now they know the mini will sell they can die-shrink the ipad 3 & get the screens made for the next one.

I appreciate that but why didn't they wait till they had enough screens to do that. It might actually hurt sales if people think that the product cycle is substantially shorter. If you think that the feature you want will only be out six months later you will hold out. Also recent buyers will feel cheated.

Kind of assumes the rumour an iPad mini retina is actually going to appear shortly. I actually doubt that. Next spring, perhaps, but not a month after launch.

The current mini has a product cycle of at least 6 months, maybe a year or so.

It will be about 12 months before it's replaced.

That's much better.

That is what annoys me about iOS and Android, to a certain degree.

For the last 30 years, we've been developing software based on the premise that we don't know what screen resolution the user will have - we can make some assumptions, but generally we don't know, so the UI elements, such as buttons and window decorations are automatically scalable.

Now on iOS and Android, we are back to the bad old days of having different sized bitmaps for each resolution.

I watched a presentation recently about this, concerning the difference between:

Device Pixels
Device Independant Pixels
CSS Pixels

and also various kinds of view ports, which have different meanings on mobile and desktop.

The conclusion was we should simply listen to what the device says and ignore the truth behind it. I presume all iPads will have the same number of DIPs and will report the same viewport sizes. Zooming will be done by Apple how they think is best, so don't try to second-guess them.

I read a tweet this morning that there's an Android phone been announced with a 1080 line display on a 5" screen. Which apparently equates to 450dpi, approximately.

The thing that occurs to me is this : beyond a certain degree, isn't this pointless? The whole sell-point of a 'retina grade' display is that, in normal use, the pixels are too small for your eye to resolve individually. Once you reach that degree of resolution, isn't then making the pixels any smaller a bit of a waste of time? They're going to be pixels slightly smaller than pixels that are already too small to see, so they're going to be... too small to see.

I can appreciate the point of having more pixels on the screen for displaying bitmaps images - e.g. displaying pictures from the inbuilt camera without scaling - but for displaying 'resolution independent' material like rendering text in emails, tests and web pages, isn't it an utter waste of time to go from say 370dpi to 450dpi? You might say it's so you can display 1080p video 'natively', but 1080p video on a handheld screen doesn't look any better than 720p video but it takes up roughly twice as much room. The only time it's better to have 1080p video on your phone is if you're piping it through a HDMI cable to a TV...

I think that above 300 dpi it makes no sense to increase the resolution any further, except for the numbers freaks. Your eyes cannot tell the difference. Though if you stream it from your phone to a TV as long as the processor is capable of handling that it makes no odds. That is one reason why I am not worried that there are Android phones out there with higher resolutions. Unless Google provide eyes which are capable of viewing such resolutions it is no different than snake oil. You cannot tell the difference.