Ever since iOS 4.3 beta 1 has come out, there’s been a lot of digging going on with lots of interesting facts being revealed regarding what the screen resolution of next-gen iPad or simply the iPad 2 will be. Yesterday, the supposed Camera.app of iPad 2 was extracted out of the iOS 4.3 SDK which hinted at no improvement in resolution over the current 1024 x 768. Now, another interesting evidence discovered by MacRumors tells a totally different story.
When iPhone 4 was launched with the introduction of Retina display, Apple doubled the iPhone 3GS’s resolution from 480×320 to 960×640 at 300 DPI. A similar approach could be adopted for iPad 2 by doubling the current iPad’s resolution from 1024 x 768 to 2048 x 1536 at about 260 DPI. This way, older apps would simply run pixel-doubled while native apps will take advantage of the full resolution of the new screen resolution. However, all this speculation is based on some images extracted from iBooks app v1.1 by @StroughtonSmith which strongly suggets that Apple is going to take this pixel-doubled approach again for the iPad 2.
As posted by MacRumors:
Version 1.1 of Apple’s iBooks application seems to have accidentally included some artwork for this hypothetical pixel-doubled iPad. As shown above, the App’s bookmark icon included versions for the iPad, the iPhone and the iPhone Retina Display (iPhonex2). It, however, also included one additional version labeled “iPadx2”. Sure enough, this is exactly double the resolution version of the iPad icon and is distinct from the other versions. The most likely explanation for this added graphic is plans for a double-resolution iPad. Apple has since removed this extra artwork in subsequent versions of iBooks.
Several commenters note that the “Retina” definition is based on a specific distance the device is being held from your eye. Since an iPad display would likely be held farther from your face, it would require a lower DPI to achieve the same effect.
Another “x2” iPad graphic found in iBooks 1.2.
Wood Tile@2x.png below. It’s current dimensions are 1536×800 pixels. For comparison, the previous Wood Tile.png in iBooks 1.1 was a mere 768×400 pixels.
Also check out some interesting iPad 2 mockups we posted earlier over here. Feel free to leave your comments below!
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[via MacRumors]
