Can someone please explain why it is beneficial to have such a resolution on a screen under 8 inches? Either I'm missing something here, or that is the most pointless thing ever in the history of computing.
100DPI on a tablet is crapBecause ~100DPI on something that's going to be 30–50cm from your face looks like
crap. Anti-aliasing techniques can help alleviate it, but not enough to make higher-DPI screens obsolete. If you've gotten used to crappy-looking text and aliased edges that's great, but some of us remember how good things can look on paper (printed at 600DPI or higher), and would love to see that on screens as well.
Aiming for >300DPIIt's not that noticeable on a 24" LCD because you don't
hold a 24" LCD screen at the same distance as an 8" tablet. 2048×1536 on an 8" tablet works out to 320DPI, which is where we start getting into print-quality DPIs (most low/medium-quality prints are typically at ~300DPI). Can you tell the difference between 100DPI and 300DPI? Sure you can, just as well as you can tell the difference between a font glyph displayed on-screen and printed on paper. And until we reach that point I assert that
we still need higher resolutions on tablet screens. I'd love to see at least 600DPI on e-readers and tablets.
MythbustingWhat, 2048×1536 can't be fitted into 8"? Sure it can, and someone's figured it out as we speak (see links above), and will figure out ways to fit more pixels in the same space in the next half a decade or so. 2048×1536 displayed on an 8" screen would look too *small*? It's about time you learned that DPI is a software thing and can be adjusted (ever learned about the large-fonts setting in your OS?). Yes, icons will have to be recreated with larger resolutions, but if there's a company that can do it, it's Apple; they have enough control over their exclusive software to pull it off. And we will watch as the rest of the world follows suit.
GPUs will need to be much more powerful? No doubt. But embedded GPUs are already capable of painting such resolutions (rendering 3D polygons is another matter though), and our current display interfaces can support this at the upper limit; HDMI 1.3 bandwidth limits can accommodate 2560×1600 @60Hz, while 1.4 can accommodate 4096×2160 @24Hz (google/wiki specs yourself).
Will it use much more battery? Possibly, but it is also possible to achieve this with minimally higher power consumption. Most of the power in an IPS display is used by the backlight. Having to control and power more display cell electrodes would certainly use more power, but depending on the panel manufacturer this increase may or may not be tiny compared to the power consumed by the backlight. This is an engineering problem and is solvable. Power consumption of LCD panels does not scale linearly with number of pixels, so wipe that assumption off your mind.
A tablet is not a “stripped-down PC”. It is a very different device, with different input methods, serving different purposes. Should a tablet screen have higher DPI than a desktop screen? Sure, because it'll be closer to your face (I’d argue that the
closer a screen is to your face, the better/higher-quality it ought to be); The resolution of human vision (
human acuity) is measured as an angle, so it makes perfect sense than the resolution of a screen, measured in DPI, should be inversely proportional to distance from the eye.
tl;drI welcome our higher-resolution-screen overlords.
