September will be spectacular for Apple. Gary Allen is reporting that Apple will build and open the world’s largest Apple Store inside Grand Central Terminal, New York, in early September. The largest today is the 16,372 square foot four-story Apple Store, Covent Garden, London, UK.
Why Grand Central Terminal? There are more than 700,000 visitors to Grand Central Terminal per day. Four Apple Stores already operate in Manhattan: Upper West Side, the glass cube on Fifth Avenue, West 14th Street, and SoHo. Apple Store, Grand Central would be just 0.8 miles away from the Fifth Avenue location, which is 10,000 square feet and considered by Jeffrey Roseman to be the highest grossing Apple Store with an estimated US$350 million in annual sales or $35,000 per square foot. Compare that to $18,000 for Tiffany & Co. and you can see how staggering that number is, for a computer / electronics store. Apple Store, Grand Central Terminal, would also serve to alleviate intense pressure from the Fifth Avenue location.
The opening of Apple Store, Grand Central Terminal, alone would be cause for great celebration, but I think it will also be the occasion for two more events. One, 2011 marks the tenth year anniversary of Apple retail: the company has enjoyed ten years of tremendous success with its Apple Stores and what would be a better time to celebrate than at the opening of the world’s largest Apple Store? Two, I expect Apple to announce the next iPad: the Retina Display-toting iPad 3, at the opening of the Apple Store, Grand Central Station, and shipping that very day. I’m just guessing here, but I think September is going to be spectacular for Apple.
DisplaySearch counted the iPad as a mobile PC. And the result is: Apple grabbed 17.2% of worldwide mobile PC shipments in Q4’10 making it the top brand, ahead of HP.
Apple shipped 10.2 million notebooks and tablets. HP at #2 shipped 9.3 million units while #3 Acer posted shipments of 8.4 million. Worldwide shipments of mobile PCs (notebooks and tablets) increased 8% Q/Q and 17% Y/Y to 59.6 million units in Q4’10.
Most of that growth was due to strong demand for tablets, particularly the iPad. It is interesting that the iPad was lumped into the mobile PC category; going forward Apple will probably extend its lead. Why? Very soon we should see Apple announce the iPad 2 and a bit later the Retina Display-equipped iPad 3.
Mitsubishi (Japanese) via Tech-On!: Mitsubishi Electric showcased its LCD-46MDR1, a 46-inch LCD TV with a unique backlight composed of a red laser diode and a cyan LED. The cyan LED is used to generate both green and blue while the red laser generates a deep 638-nm wavelength red. Several tens of red laser diodes and several hundred cyan LEDs are used in an edge-lit design.
While all other specifications like brightness, contrast ratio, power consumption, etc. are similar to other white LED backlit Mitsubishi LCD TVs, color gamut is improved to 126% NTSC with a marked enhancement in red vividness.
According to component suppliers and reported by DigiTimes, Apple has cornered 60% of global glass capacitive touch panel capacity resulting in a tight supply situation for competitors like HP, Motorola, and RIM. I don’t know the specifics but it wouldn’t be surprising if Apple is using its huge cash reserves to secure these touch panels ahead of new product announcements.
Apple just started selling its CDMA iPhone 4 on Verizon Wireless and will most likely announce the next-generation iPad 2 soon (and the iPad 3) and another updated iPhone (read Wait For The Next iPhone: iPhone 4S) in June or July. Both the iPhone and iPad require glass-based capacitive touch panels. Yields for touch panels were a problem in 2010, but by securing roughly 60% of global capacity Apple is maximizing its chances to meet what will be enormous demand for its new iPhones and iPads in 2011.
Sony just unveiled the largest OLED displays money can buy: the Trimaster EL series professional monitors. The Trimaster EL OLED monitors come in two sizes: the 17-inch BVM-E170 and the 25-inch BVM-E250.
Both models have 1920×1080 pixel formats, a first for OLED displays, and use 10-bit OLED panels, good for billions of colors. Viewing angles are 178/178. I can only imagine, but I expect color and images to be amazing.
The smaller BVM-E170 will be available July 1st for ¥1,312,500 (about US$15,700) and the bigger BVM-E250 on May 1st for ¥2,415,000 (about US$28,900). The professional broadcast market is about the only market that could possibility bear these prices.
State-of-the-art displays? Yes. Ridiculously expensive? Absolutely.
Jef Raskin, Feb. 16, 1981:
The screen resolution is 384 dots across by 256 dots vertically, which is close enough to the TV standard 4:3 aspect ratio so that little screen space is wasted if the monitor is adjusted so that dots are on a square grid. Human factors considerations shows that the ideal size of such a screen is very close to the viewing area of a standard 9″ television CRT. Bandwidth considerations limited the 6809-based system to 256 by 256 dots, which would have been optimally displayed on a 7″ tube.
This is from exactly 30 years ago. And the interesting thing is that Raskin and the designers and engineers at Apple today seem to agree. The near 4:3 aspect ratio is intriguing. According to Raskin, Apple chose an aspect ratio that was close to the TV standard, which was 4:3. It’s a bit more complicated today and in my opinion there really is no TV standard as in TV content. But if you look at the entire world, I’d guess that the majority of TV viewers are still at 4:3 with only advanced economies quickly shifting to wide-format HD. The Macintosh revolutionized personal computing.
Today, the 4:3 aspect ratio can be found in the iPad, which can be argued is revolutionizing personal computing again. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Between the first Macintosh and the latest iPad are thirty years. But the 4:3 aspect ratio remain the same. And both are revolutionary.
Coupled with the spectacular screen, a four-inch Super LED with a 800 x 480 resolution [...]
What the heck is a Super LED? I hope HTC isn’t trying to do a Samsung, who fooled a lot of people into thinking that a LED TV is something completely different than a LCD TV. There really is no such thing as a LED TV unless you want to call those huge LED billboards a TV. Same goes for Super LED: no such thing for use in a smartphone.
According to the press release by HTC that Engadget swiped in its entirety the Incredible S uses a Super LCD. I believe all LCD-based high-end smartphones have LED as a light source. So don’t let anyone fool you with a nonsensical term like LED TV. Or Super LED.
The screen is 4.8 inches and 1024×480. Really now.
Yes, really. That’s a 21:9 aspect ratio, similar to the 21:9 TVs from Philips. This isn’t the first time a mobile phone brand has incorporated this particular ultra-wide aspect ratio. That honor would go to LG for its BL40 New Chocolate. Even Toyota has fitted a 21:9 display in its Sienna. So this isn’t anything new. Now, a 21:9 display has certain expectations that go with it. Foremost is the expectation that watching feature films will be most excellent, at least better than the regular 16:9 smartphones out there.
The 1024×480 pixel format leads to a resolution of almost 236PPI, so that’s a very good start. The high resolution will certainly lead to both sharp and smooth images in movies. Most movies that come in DVDs aren’t 16:9 but wider. You’ve most likely noticed that there are black horizontal bars while watching DVDs even on your 16:9 HDTV. That’s why. On the Acer Iconia Smart you should have no horizontal bars and that’s a major plus. You won’t have to double-tap on the display to fill the screen. On the flip side, there are a lot of TV content that is formatted 16:9. In this case the regular smartphones will look better with the Iconia Smart having vertical black bars!
The Acer Iconia Smart with its ultra-wide 21:9 4.8-inch LCD will be superb when watching feature films, but not so much when watching TV content in HD. I hope Acer saw it fit to use an IPS LCD to make the point clear that the Iconia Smart was designed for discerning on-the-go movie buffs. You guys do exist, right?
As far as the display goes, we’re extremely excited to see new Android phones taking higher resolution screens. With the added real estate the qHD provides, we were able to get a lot more utility out of Gmail, the browser, and a handful of other content-heavy applications, and text and images looked crystal clear on the display. There were some issues with Android applications that don’t properly take advantage of increased resolution, but they were few and far between — for the vast majority of software we used, the display worked beautifully. Touch response was also excellent, though we can’t say if that’s due to the screen technology at play here, or that super fast CPU. One item of note — the display is difficult to see in bright daylight, and the automatic brightness adjustment didn’t quite do the trick.
The Motorola Atrix 4G has a 4-inch TFT LCD with a pixel format of 960×540. I dislike meaningless jargon as much as the next guy so I’ll try to unpack this useless term: qHD. The q stands for quarter and HD refers to 1920×1080. Put two together and you get quarter HD. Halve the horizontal and halve vertical and you get a quarter: 960×540, exactly one quarter of HD. Now the funny thing is when anyone wants to refer to a pixel format of 1920×1080, they usually say Full HD and/or 1080p, not HD. So technically and more correctly it should be qFHD, another ugly jargon. Using the term qHD only makes things more complicated; I hope it goes away.
The 960×540 pixel format on the Atrix 4G translates into a resolution of 275PPI, which is lower than the class-leading iPhone 4 (326PPI), but still quite high. Using a looser definition of Retina Display would this qualify? I think so. Like Topolsky has already mentioned the text and images are crystal clear. I’m glad to see other brands besides Apple and Samsung put more emphasis on great displays. That’s great, but:
I’m not an Android app developer, but if I were one I’d be pulling my hair out! There are too many different pixel formats to support. I’m surprised that there aren’t more apps that don’t fully support the higher resolution LCD on the Atrix 4G. And it’s not like 480×270 was the default pixel format before and now all developers have to do is double the pixels vertically and horizontally. I think display pixel format fragmentation on the Android platform is going to get worse. And that’s one of the reasons why I don’t think Apple will be coming out with a smaller iPhone with a different pixel format. iOS developers want to develop and deploy apps as quickly as possible. Having to code for a different set of pixel formats not only make the development process more difficult, it takes longer to push it out, and adds a lot of burden on customer support.
Apple won’t go down to 7 inches for its iPad (read Steve Jobs: 7-inch Tablets DOA) but for some reason Samsung, the purveyor of the most successful 7-inch tablet, has moved toward a larger 10.1-inch version: the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Initial feedback coming out of Barcelona seems to point to a high-end TFT LCD, maybe even an IPS, with generally very good display qualities. The pixel format, like the Motorola Xoom, is 1280×800. Here are some interesting quotes about the Galaxy Tab 10.1:
The screen is gorgeous, and the extra resolution over the iPad (1280 x 800 Vs. 1025 x 768) makes movies pop. The screen can do 1080p, but that’s just a marketing check-box. At this size, it makes little difference.
FYI: The iPad’s pixel format is 1024×768. But the more important metric is pixel density, or resolution, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (149PPI) beats the iPad (132PPI) with fonts and graphics that will look sharper and smoother all at the same time. The additional pixels don’t make movies pop, but 1280×800 can display 720p HD video without scaling and that would make a big difference. And the screen cannot do 1080p.
1280×800 means that the aspect ratio is 16:10, not 16:9. I would think Samsung would position the Galaxy Tab 10.1 as a multimedia consumption device and perfectly align the display dimensions to playback HD content. I guess not. 16:9 does look quite narrow and maybe that’s why Samsung went for a less-narrow look. I wrote more about this in The Tablet to Create a Better World where Motorola decided the same thing with its Xoom.
Obviously, the heart and soul of the tablet is its 1280 x 800-resolution 10.1-inch TFT display, and while it’s not Super AMOLED or Super AMOLED Plus quality, it looked quite bright at a variety of angles. We’d venture to say that Samsung’s using a similar panel as in the original Tab here, which is certainly a good thing.
Samsung’s Super AMOLED / Plus displays are marvelous, but I wouldn’t put them atop the very best IPS displays. There have been numerous tests conducted by DisplayMate and the most diplomatic conclusion seems to be they are both excellent with different pros and cons. Although the new Galaxy Tab 10.1 doesn’t sport the latest OLED from Samsung, if that 10.1-inch LCD is IPS then it has one of the finest displays money can buy.
The 1280×800 display (the new standard resolution for tablets) looked sharp, though it will of course be sharper on smaller devices. The extra inch or so of vertical room makes it feel spacious compared to the iPad.
A few brands come out with tablets sporting a 1280×800 and now it is claimed the “new standard resolution for tablets.” I think the reigning standard is still 1024×768 and it will continue to be until the iPad 3 comes out, at which point the standard will become 2048×1536.
In terms of spaciousness, the iPad’s 4:3 display area is a little over 45 square inches (7.76×5.82 inches). The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is almost 45.8 square inches (8.56×5.35 inches). The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is more spacious and that was expected since it has a bigger display. But not by much.
Samsung along with others are shifting toward a display size of around 10 inches for their tablets. Why? Apple did its homework and got it right, the first time.
DisplayBlog is written and produced by Jin Kim. Subscribe via RSS.