Taiwan parts firms point to iPad 2 res rise
Component maker moles say 'retina display' coming to Apple tab
Confirmation - kind of - for the iPad 2's screen resolution increase has come from Taiwan's component maker community.
Sources from within that group have indicated that Apple's next-gen tablet will indeed sport a resolution of 2048 x 1536 - four times as many pixels in the same area as the current iPad's screen delivers.
The claim comes in a DigiTimes report. While its sources - or possibly just source - are in a strong position to know, it's important to bear in mind that the site doesn't qualify how close they might be to Apple and its suppliers.
As such, the moles may simply be spouting the speculation that Apple is upping the iPad 2's screen resolution, rather than passing on what they know for sure to be fact.
We remain cautiously optimistic. The evidence for such a resoltuion hike is at best circumstantial, at worst entirely made up. But it's certainly possible for Apple to do, and doubling the resolution rather than moving up to, say, 1920 x 1080, makes it much easier for developers to support.
As yet Apple hasn't told the majority of developers that they should ready hi-res graphics updates for their iPad apps, which suggests either it has no such jump in mind, or that there will be sufficient time for devs to do so between the iPad 2's launch and its ship date.
Apple clearly won't want to tell them anything until the product is announced. To do so would effectively be to tell World+Dog what it's planning - information it doesn't want its competitors to use to their advantage.
Upping the resolution to 2048 x 1536 would immediately set the iPad 2 well apart from the raft of rivals about to row ashore once Google equips them with Android 3.0 paddles. ®
COMMENTS
let's get this straight.....
a speculating mole possibly has some information about a higher res screen but you are "cautiously optimistic. The evidence for such a resolution hike is at best circumstantial"
hmm..
make a sentence out of the following words*
"we have no idea about the next ipad but like to put its name in articles because its the only product that people are actually interested in, and mentioning apple always causes a bit of a ruck"
*see, i've done it for you.
Yes it is a guess but...
..you're missing the fact that the same "@2x" naming convention was used for the iPhone 4 images, which *did* turn out to be twice the resolution of its predecessor: 960x640 (326 ppi ) versus 320x480 (163 ppi).
Also doubling the resolution makes a lot of sense when it comes to existing apps as they can be upscaled by an integer amount. Which again is what happened with the iPhone 4.
Remember 2048x1536 would still only be around 260ppi, so there is no doubt that they can make a display that dense. Whether they can provide enough horsepower to shift that number of pixels around without killing the battery is a different matter.
Why they think it's 2048x1536
The sad thing is, just why they assume the resolution will be 2048x1536:
File name conventions for images for the new iPad2 vs the original iPad ask that the iPad2 images have an X2 in the filename so the iOS can automatically display the proper images for the new device (likely due to a resolution bump). Now, X2 could be gen2, but very likely could be "twice as big" x2 multiplier... Guess which one makes the best news story? Even if it is x2, the 2048x1536 guessed resolution is taking the current 1024x768 and multiplying BOTH dimensions: 1024x2 = 2048, and 768x2 = 1536 and boom: x4 screen. LIKELY what they're using the x2 for (if it is indeed indicating a multiplier) is a rounded PIXEL count. Current iPad displays are 786k pixels, so 2x786k = 1.57MP. Granted, reversing that down to a 1920 screen leaves only 819 for the x9 side instead of 1080, this discrepancy is likely just because it's easier to say x2 than x2.63671875.
'Nuf said.
... So it will come with more RAM?
and likely more bandwidth use.
There's a lot you can stretch without quality loss, but not bitmapped images, etc.
I just hope iOS 5(?) will let you download "updates" and not just whole replacements for the apps. The GPS apps are over 1Gb and you have to download the whole danged thing if they release ver 1.x+
What they don't tell you is....
The new ipad is bigger than A3 size, and comes with a free slave to carry it.
