Samsung 11.6in 'retina display' tablet spied
Mobile World Congress outing for Ice Cream Sarnie tab?
Are ten-inch tablets too small for you? Rumour has it Samsung will introduce an 11.6in Galaxy Tab during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) show next month.
Details are inevitably vague. German-language site TabTech gives the screen size but doesn't provide a resolution. The Samsung tablet will run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, it says, but no one would have assumed otherwise.
Meanwhile, AndroidAndMe mentions a resolution, 2560 x 1600, based on an earlier announcement, but doesn't say how big it will be other than "larger than ten inches".
Both sites say the tablet will be based on the 2GHz Exynos 5250 dual-core ARM chip that Samsung announced late last year.
At the time, Samsung said the Exynos has a graphics engine capable of running a 2560 x 1600 display, so the sites' resolution claims may simply be an assumption based on the chip, rather than a study of the display's pixel count.
AndroidAndMe bases its claims on a unit it saw at this month's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and which Samsung officials were insistent must not be photographed.
Even though an 11.6in screen is pushing it a bit for a handheld display, we can see Samsung offering such a beast, though likely with a more everyday resolution of 1366 x 768.
Samsung has shown off a 10.1in, 2560 x 1600 display, but it was a prototype and, when demo'd in May 2011, came with no indication of when - or if - it would come to market. ®
COMMENTS
your are the problem
You are exactly the problem, the manufacturers are listening to you because your opinion is cheaper. I don't think I need a 2560x1600 screen in my laptop but I do need more than 768 vertical pixels.
If the icons are too small for you you just need to set the OS dpi to match the screen dpi and the icons will be the correct size but there will be more detail available where you need it. I couldn't care less about watching HD movies on my laptop. I want resolution for editing photographs, I want it for writing code, I want it for viewing spreadsheets.
It's your lack of understanding and that of people like you that has caused this situation. Up to around 200dpi more resolution is better, beyond that it gets debatable.
re: Fuzz
You are totally right. Why haven't the resolutions of laptop displays improved in recent years?
I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 that dates from around 2003 with a 1600x1200 screen. At the time, it was the top of the range display.
These days, pretty well only Apple make anything with a vertical size greater then 1080.
The majority of laptops on sale today seem to be 1366x768.
Perhaps this and the iPad 3's rumoured similar sized screen is a taste of things to come?
Paris because size is everything
@Chris Miller
I can't think of anything worse than a 16:9 display to use if you actually want to get some work done instead of stare at films. There's not enough vertical room, you're continually scrolling windows.
Compromises
If it's a phone, it has to be small enough go in your pocket (and be tough enough to be sat on).
If not, it might as well be big enough to show a sheet of A4 at life-size.
Anything in-between is just a trade-off between the two useful sizes.
resolution madness
So Samsung are quite happy to produce a tablet with an 11.6" screen and a crazy high resolution but their "ultra"book is limited to a paltry 1366x768 on a larger 13.3" screen.
They obviously see the need for larger resolution screens and they are producing them, how about a bit of joined up thinking to put the two together. This screen in an ultrabook would be worthy of name.
