3 ms·

Now that there are 3 different iphone resolutions, are we going to keep hearing about how bad fragmentation is?

• ugh 16y ago
  What’s the third one? The iPad? That’s fragmentation you want – iPhone apps make no sense on that device. Other than that, doubling the horizontal and vertical number of pixels (four times the pixels) is actually quite clever and will probably not lead to any fragmentation. Since the display’s size won’t change in any significant way, old iPhone apps will just look the same on the new device (every pixel will just be displayed four times, no need for ugly interpolation) – everything that’s a vector and not pixels will just look better without any effort on the developers’ part. The old iPhones presumably won’t have any problem with apps that come with higher resolution bitmaps. Since the screen size doesn’t change it also doesn’t make any sense to add any additional elements which would then be too small for older devices – the size of our fingers and the resolution of our eyes is the limiting factor here, not the resolution of the screen. All of this also means that a increase in resolution is no more a big leap forward (i.e. it allows you to display more stuff), it “merely” makes text, videos and photos look much nicer. It’s quite cool that we finally reached that point.
  • DougBTX 16y ago
    Palm did the same trick when they switched from 160x160 screens to 320x320, back in the day.