iPhone 6 could be set to get a 5in 1080p screen

If there’s one thing that seems certain about the iPhone 6, it’s that Apple’s next smartphone is going to have a bigger screen than the existing iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S. Rumours have circulated about the exact screen size for a while, but now Japanese Magazine MacFun, reported via Macotakara, is saying that the iPhone 6 may have a 5in screen with a Full HD resolution of 1,920×1,080. The magazine is also claiming that the phone will launch in September 2014, almost a year after the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C were unveiled.

It’s interesting to see this information, but if Apple does move to this resolution it has some work cut out for it, as it’s always been restrictive on resolution in the past. So, when the company went Retina with the iPhone 4, it quadrupled the resolution of the iPhone 3GS from 480×320 to 960×640. This made it easy to scale apps up or down to fit the new resolution. With the iPhone 5 going widescreen, Apple simply added some pixels on to the top and bottom of the screen to give a resolution of 1,136×640, allowing existing apps to run with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, but otherwise unchanged.

Adding in a new resolution with 1,920×1,080 could make life a bit more difficult. Despite having the same aspect ratio as the existing iPhones, scaling up from 1,136×640 to 1,920×1,080 isn’t quite as clean, as the new resolution is 1.69 times more resolution horizontally and 1.69 time more vertically.

That’s not to say that Apple won’t go down this route, but for ease of scaling and to avoid complications, we could see the company doubling the vertical and horizontal resolutions of the iPhone 5S to give a new screen with a resolution of 2,272×1,280. This may be more resolution than is technically required by Apple’s definition of Retina, but it could make life easier for developers. via