

This Is The Reason Why The iPhone Will Always Have A 3.5-inch Screen - Garbage
http://www.redmondpie.com/ever-wondered-why-the-iphone-has-a-3.5-inch-screen-this-might-be-an-appropriate-answer/

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cheald
Ugh, not this again.

* The SGS II is shown as relatively larger than it actually is, compared to the iPhone.

* The SGS thumb circle is smaller.

The iPhone will always have a 3.5" screen because the 3:2 aspect ratio makes
the phone unusably _wide_ if you increase the diagonal by any marketable
number. Those 4.3" Android phones run at a whopping 16:9, and are only
slightly wider than the iPhone as a result (2.11" vs 1.94"). A 4.3" diagonal
iPhone would be a behemoth 2.39" wide.

iPhones are locked to a 3:2 aspect ratio because apps are all designed with
the promise of a 3:2 aspect ratio, and a different aspect ratio would break
the layout of every single app in the app store today. Apple had to increase
the resolution of their offering with the iPhone 4 to compete with the high-
resolution Android handsets being released, but they had to increase it by an
integer factor, or else applications would be blurry/laid out slightly wrong
due to the pixel-oriented layouts iOS apps use, so they doubled the
resolution, kept the screen size the same, and marketed the shit out of the
resulting DPI.

The iPhone will always have a 3.5" screen because Apple has a tremendous
amount of legacy software on the platform that would break in all the most un-
Apple ways if they were to create a larger phone.

Here is an exactly to-scale comparison of the phones' screen sizes, done by
yours truly: <http://i.imgur.com/b7UI3.png>

And for fun, here's a comparison of what a 4.3" iPhone screen would be like
next to a current iPhone and the SGS II: <http://i.imgur.com/du83N.png>

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beej71
_The SGS thumb circle is smaller_

I would never have noticed that if you hadn't pointed it out, but it is,
indeed, smaller.

Not that it matters; my thumb extends usably well beyond the opposite edge of
the iPhone. And you know what they say about guys with long thumbs: they can
use bigger phones.

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suivix
I just compared my Droid X to my iPod Touch and don't see a large ergonomic
advantage with the latter.

