Be Excellent To Each Other

Following this, on top of a lot of longer-running sketchier rumours, I'd say it's now certain that Apple have final stage prototype 4" iPhones. This is a device with the same horizontal width and pixel count (and same vertical phone size), but extra vertical pixels, creating an almost 16x9 screen. Some apps would stretch vertically, some would have to letterbox, at least until they get updates.

Doesn't mean we're going to see them launch a 4" iPhone 5, of course, but it now seems at least likely to me.

The best mockup I've seen of how this would look is from Will Hains:



Personally, I think that seems like a nice idea.

Why can't I just give them all my money right now?

If you don't change your password, they could just take it whenever they liked.

I wonder how long Apple can maintain their reputation without doing anything new. I mean iPod/iPhone sort of new. It's all starting to look very staid and boring.

It's another iphone....

Hmmm. The zillions of dollars that keep pouring into its coffers suggest your view isn't common, though. The first, second, and third best-selling phones on AT&T are the iPhone 4S, 4, and 3GS. There's a case to be made for not messing with success.

Each iThing integrates nicely with those preceeding it, dioesn't it, so you can use all your apps on your iphone 1 on your iPhone 4S? That's a big thing for me, if I were to get a new phone.

There is, but they got that success through massive innovation. There's a fair chance there will be a tipping point where people start wondering where the innovation went.

You mean it has a corporate look and feel? What would you like to see different?

At least that won't fuck the majority of sites that are built for the current iphone, as they are mostly width locked and vertical scrolling.

It'd be ace if it could replace an oyster card, or jsut be used for contactless patyment of stuff.

Apple don't remember the complaints during the 4:3 to 16:9 Tv transition, then. Or that people still think something's broken with a 2.35:1 film on a 16:9 telly.

Then again, most people just set the 'make it fit' option and are happy, so eh.

I'm less convinced by this than some. "Hey, now my credit card and public transport card has batteries in and stops working if it goes flat." Given the parlous state of modern smartphone batteries, I think you'd be brave to leave your wallet at home; but if you still have a wallet, what's the point?

I'm ideas, not details.

EDIT: You could have a programeable RFID chip in it.

I don't know and that's the point. It's like asking me what I would want an iPod, iPad or iPhone to be before I've ever seen one.

It wouldn't need batteries though would it? Oyster cards don't have batteries do they? I think I might patent a debit card sellotaped to the back of my phone.

They need to make it somewhat different to give annoying cockssome reason to buy it and show off the new expensive thing they bought on the train.

They got it out if the park with the 4s and that voice command arse, I'm not sure they can top that.

NFC will clearly be the standard, and it has incredibly low power requirements. You could very easily keep enough charge in the battery to keep the NFC chip alive long after the phone would need to shut down.

Note you can already get NFC iPhone cases.

Not if they put an RFID chip and the neccesary power/communication loops physically into the phone (or, in the case of metal phones, outside the phone). Far more likely that they'll drive an NFC chip using software, though.

The HTC One X (and others) already have NFC chips built into them. I even used one the other day to "talk" to a timetable and see when the next boat was coming.

That's how existing NFC apps for other phones work, though I'm not entirely sure why. You could, of course, just get a phone case with a credit card slot and put an Oystercard in it.

I reject both sides of this supposition. I don't think the iPhone was massively innovative. There were plenty of other all-touchscreen smartphones with SDKs around at the time, and most of them had better specs. I'd argue the iPhone combined four and only four genuinely new things in its recipe for smartphone success: ease of use, capacitive touchscreen, microtransactions for app purchases, and (eventually) HiDPI displays. Other than that, it's designed to melt away and be a frame for apps. The killer app is the App Store itself. As such, I'd prefer to see innovation in software than hardware.

Looking around the mobile industry, I don't see anyone doing anything significant with hardware I wished my iPhone did. Do you?

This seems like a really weird design decision to me in that it's going to create a non-zero amount of hassle with the aspect ratio to, well, what benefit exactly? By which I mean 'what benefit compared to just scaling it up horizontally and vertically'.

The capacitive touchscreen was the innovation that made touch devices great and not a giant pile of dick. Without that, the iPhone would never have taken the dominant position it has.



Yep, absolutely. A FUCKING MICRO USB SOCKET.

The ability to bluetooth all contacts from one phone to another.

Have 16x9 proportions?

You know, like mine did a month ago ;-)

This is going to change my whole lifestyle.

I have a solution for that whole credit smartphone battery flat oyster problem. Every time you swipe it somewhere, it sends a massive bolt of electricity through it and thus charging it. Sounds good, right?

Your Mum's had 16x9 portions.

So just incremental updates to their existing products then. I'm not saying that they won't continue to make lots of money just that they will, in fairly short order, cease to be in any way interesting or exciting.

There's a good writeup of the reasons to do thishere at iMore.

In all seriousness, if Apple would bring out an iPhone with a genuinely decent sized* screen it would drag me one significant step closer to ditching Android purely for the quality of the games on iOS. As it stands though I've been spoiled by my recent phones and I don't think I could go back to the current iPhone screen size.

*Off the top of my head I don't know exactly what 'decent' means in this sentence I have to admit though. If, in a totally shock move, they brought out a Galaxy Note sized iPhone tomorrow I think I'd find myself in the nearest Apple store buying it before I knew what was happening. At the very least though something the size of the newer HTC phones (Sensation etc) would have me considering it I think).

I don't understand why aspect ratios are important.

I think Trooper covered it pretty well. Sites that are currently sized for the iPhone have a fixed width and scroll vertically. A taller iPhone means you don't have to change that. A taller and wider iPhone means you would.

Apps are a different story, of course. As Doc says, they'll have to letterbox for now, I guess. I wonder if there will now be a new type of universal App - a single binary for iPhone<5, iPhone5, and iPad.

FTFY.

Although it's still pretty wrong. You optimise for 100% width for mobile devices, not a set number. Or, more specifically, the width that the device that's actually looking at the page can support.

Cras -- read the iMore link above for a discussion of app scaling.

It was specifically the apps I was thinking of, I hadn't even imagined that web browsing would be an issue to be honest (ETA: because I assumed it just worked the way Grim describes). I need to read the Doc's link though first which I haven't had a chance to do yet.

Having read that, and assuming I'm understanding it correctly, the benefits of 'vertical scale only' vs 'horizontal and vertical scale' is that putting the extra space into one dimension only means, obviously, you get more of it (in that dimension) than you would if you divided the extra space up between the two dimension; therefore the UI can wring more benefit from the extra space?

I'd made the mistake of assuming that iOS apps could do some amount of automatic scaling so preserving the aspect ratio would mean no black boxing as everything could just scale equally in both dimensions and come out looking the same (but bigger). I'm still a bit surprised to hear that wouldn't (or couldn't?) happen for some reason, but I'm happy to accept it as I'm no expert in any of the issues involved.

It'll be interesting to see how Apple handle the fragmentation that these kind of hardware changes will introduce. Do they just accept it and devs need to start handling more hardware sets in their apps; or do they start trying to kill off older devices for the sake of convenience (which I suppose is pretty much out of their hands; if people want to go on using older devices then the market for apps for them remains a factor no matter what Apple do). Obviously they'll never get anywhere near the level of fragmentation that the Android market needs to deal with, but such things are a pure fact of life for Android devs where for iOS guys presumably even one more hardware profile is a significant pain the ass.

I have the horrible feeling of inevitability about a 16:9 iPhone, but here's the thing—we're really talking 9:16 most of the time, which is just odd. It pushes the device too far from the golden ratio, and it's going to be a nightmare for developers, and especially indies. Games are going to be royally fucked (at best, we'll see 'stretched' redesigns where nothing happens in the extra space, to avoid screwing things for people using 3:2 displays), as will many apps designed for the existing ratio. We'll have myriad apps with black bars at the edges of the screen. And for what benefit? So video looks a bit better in landscape? Great. It's not even like the screen would be 720p anyway, so I really don't get the need for this new screen ratio.

I like Gizmodo's take, even if I think the headline's probably going to be wrong.

If this does happen, I'm eager to see how Apple pushes a new ratio as any kind of advantage. An extra row of icons on the home screen (which is an increasingly irksome means of managing apps)! An extra tweet in portrait! A really weird typing experience in landscape! Fragmentation? Pfft!

EDIT: @Bamba—Apple doesn't give a shit about dev hardship. It'll say: deal with it or fuck off. Worth also noting that 3:2 and 4:3 are pretty similar, but 16:9 and 4:3 are some way off, meaning this will also make universal app/game dev much harder. I don't know a single dev yet who's happy about a 16:9 iPhone.

EDIT THE SECOND: Also, a cynic might say that the new iPhone will have 4G [SUB: PLEASE CHECK IF 4G ACTUALLY AVAILABLE IN MANY COUNTRIES AND IF APPLE WILL GET SMACKED ABOUT THIS AGAIN] and therefore a 9:16 form factor provides extra space for a battery, if the shape of the unit is to change. (Alternatively, Apple could just eat into space around the screen, but then it would sell fewer accessories, and during the life of iOS devices, Apple usually sticks to a form factor for one revision, not two.

I don't follow this line of reasoning.

3D games (Need For Speed) are rendering the graphics anyway, so they change the output resolution, exactly as we do when changing screen resolution when gaming on the desktop. DPI hasn't changed, so texture assets don't need to be re-drawn.

2D sprite-based games with scrolling (Angry Birds, Temple Run, Civilization) can display a larger play area without, it seems to me, any drastic changes. Again, DPI hasn't changed, so the sprite assets don't need to be changed either -- the game simply shows some extra of them. At most, games like Jetpack Joyride might get a touch easier if the player can see further down the play field. This is a game that lets you buy in-game stuff for real cash, of course. The game balancing ship sailed long ago.

2D sprite-based games without scrolling (Hero Acadamy) have it harder. They'd have to letterbox or go through painful changes. But I think there are far fewer games in this category.

What makes it a nightmare for most game devs, who are in the first two categories?

There's nothing magic about the golden ratio. Plus, phi is 1.618. The iPhone screen today is 1.5:1. 16/9 is 1.78:1. The proposed 4" size is only barely further away from this "magic standard" than the current phone.

This really needs to improve. Folders have helped a little, but there's still no really good solution on the market, imo.
From what I've seen, WP7 does it best.

I'm fixing loads of stuff today!

They do it by not having any apps worth downloading.

In what way? Isn't it still a big list of apps in no particular order that you can choose to re-arrange?

I like Live Tiles a lot, mind. But that's not an app organisation tool, that's a widget solution for communication small amounts of state in an easy-to-digest form.

IIRC from looking at Craster's phone, it's a vertically-scrolling list with a big old 'filter' box at the top. Probably best to wait for someone that owns one to tell us, though.

Yup. There would be an argument to say that it's no different to the spotlight search on iOS though.

It's a bit different (one long list, versus vertical pages), but it doesn't seem to me to be obviously better than iOS's Home Screen at allowing the user to manage, say, three hundred apps. Right?

That's not to say that I wouldn't appreciate changed to iOS. As I said earlier, I think Live Tiles are ace, and I'd definitely appreciate dynamic icons that offered similar features.

I always forget about that. It's broadly similar, fo'sho'.

Your first paragraph there Craig pretty much exactly sums up the reasons my assumption about the impact of a aspect ratio change and thus why I can't understand it as a decision. Thank you for phrasing it all much better than I ever could!



I know Apple's general attitude to everyone is 'our way or the highway' but given that, as DocG says, the amount and quality of apps is the draw of iOS surely they can't afford to completely ignore the impact on developers of decisions like this? In the current climate people will presumably grumble while putting up with it because they'd be giving up too much to jump ship to another platform, but if Apple were to keep making decisions like this (i.e. without any concern for devs) then the environment becomes subtly more hostile for developers and that can't ever be a good thing for anyone involved, Apple included, in the long term.

Apple's always been arrogant, though, and its response will really be: deal with it or fuck off. The problem here is Apple is introducing some major fragmentation for the second time (the first being Retina) and a fair number of indie devs probably will fuck off (not necessarily to Android, say, but just from everything), or we'll end up with black bars top and bottom for tons of apps, versus black bars only in widescreen video. To my mind, this is mental, but if we get a 9:16 iPhone, I guess Apple's banking on enough developers reworking their apps for the new form factor and taking the hit in terms of dev costs.

@Doctor Glyndwr: 16:9 is a long way from 3:2 and 4:3. In some cases, devs will be able to either hack off the top/bottom or add more to the sides (in landscape; the opposite in portrait), but at the very least you're talking about issues regarding item placement (i.e. not placing anything important in the extra space, which effectively becomes a 'dead' area for gaming), issues regarding the placement of on-screen controls, and extra testing time. Even with games like Orbital, which could easily be 'stretched' from a visual standpoint, you end up potentially disrupting the balance of the gameplay by adding extra space.

Going from iPhone to iPad is a ton of work for indie devs, but this extra form factor will break some of them. On a platform that's so far largely avoided Android-style fragmentation, disruption of this sort is a pity, but then, as I said, Apple doesn't really give a crap about that and assumes enough devs will come along for the ride.


I agree that there are fewer, but plenty of the games I review for Tap! and IGamer (and apps, for that matter, including the vast majority of music apps, interactive books, etc.) are fixed-size. iOS was never initially designed along the lines of Android, with its 'responsive'/'liquid' layouts. Devs used the screen area available to them. This is going to hit them hard.


I'll read Devlin's article later, but I and many designers would argue there is aesthetic appeal in that ratio, but I was also talking about the device itself, unless (again, as I said), Apple utilises space within the existing form factor (unlikely, since it probably wants a bigger battery in there). Also, 16:9 is fine, but 9:16 is just plain odd on existing devices. Part of the joy in iOS has been in devices being really great regardless of orientation. A 16:9 design seems to shift it closer to being a landscape unit.

As for managing apps, back in my Cult of Mac days, I mocked up this:



I was always hopeful that we'd at least get an alphabetical list of installed apps that could be filtered. Regardless, the iOS model was great when it was just Apple's apps but it's a pain in the arse when you've more than about 30 apps on your device.