It is almost a given now that the upcoming iPhone 5 will have a larger 4 inch screen. A wealth of evidence has accumulated suggesting that the new iPhone’s display will measure just under 4 inches diagonally and come with a new screen resolution. While a larger screen is good news for those of us who love using apps and games on our phones it does create some potential problems for them too.
From all of the information available it seems that the iPhone 5 screen will taller than earlier iPhone screens but fairly similar in width. This does not just make the screen bigger, but will mean that there will be a completely different aspect ratio compared to earlier iPhones.
Every iPhone from the original in 2007 to last year’s iPhone 4S has had the same 3:2 aspect ratio. While the iPhone 4 and 4S had an increase in screen resolution to 960 x 640, this was still the same proportions as earlier models and easy to adjust content for.
The iPhone 5 is thought to add an extra 176 pixels to the resolution used by the iPhone 4S, which will result in a completely new resolution of 1136 x 960 and a new widescreen aspect ratio of 16:9. This is great news for watching movies on your iPhone, as it will remove those annoying black bars, but will it also necessitate the use of these black bars in existing apps and games that you may have accumulated?
While some apps may be able to easily adjust themselves to this new resolution, others may have difficulty doing so without stretching content or adding those annoying black bars. This was one of the main arguments Apple had always used against increasing the iPhone’s screen size above 3.5 inches; having multiple screen sizes would create a fragmented ecosystem.
At WWDC Apple hinted at the existence of a feature in iOS 6 called Auto Layout. It was presumed that Auto Layout would be a system for automatically adjusting content for the new screen resolution.
The Auto Layout feature has been shown to add an extra row of app icons when the 1136 x 640 resolution is used on iOS 6. The onscreen keyboard has also been found to space out slightly when used in landscape. But while these features may be easily applied to the iOS interface, will they be applicable to third-party apps and games? Or will the developers of these apps need to produce updates to accommodate the new screen resolution?
Many third party apps already make use of Apple UI elements of course, and it is quite likely that many of these will be automatically configured by Auto Layout. For other apps, until updates are issued at least, may simply have to run in a letterbox mode for the time being. We will only find out for sure how existing apps and games will be affected by the iPhone 5’s new screen size when the phone is unveiled by Apple next month.
Simon Drew writes for Best Mobile Contracts, a UK based mobile phone website.
Few days ago Apple Inc. launched the iPhone 5 in the market having the new iOS 6 Operating System, I think iPhone 5 won’t really affect the apps screen size because Apple developers re-engineered this new model and made it completely incredible.