Microsoft Research:

IllumiRoom uses a Kinect for Windows cam­era and a pro­jec­tor to blur the lines between on-screen con­tent and the envi­ron­ment we live in allow­ing us to com­bine our vir­tual and phys­i­cal worlds. For exam­ple, our sys­tem can change the appear­ance of the room, induce appar­ent motion, extend the field of view, and enable entirely new game experiences.

Neat idea.

PhoneArena: Codenamed M4, which I’ll call One mini, sports a 4.3-inch dis­play with a 1280×720 pixel for­mat. Although I pre­fer smaller smartphones—pre-iPhone 5 dis­play sizes being the opti­mum size in my opinion—a mere addi­tion of 0.4 inches on the HTC One gets me to to full 1920×1080. The dif­fer­ence in dis­play size on the One mini is just too small to jus­tify step­ping down from 1920×1080.

Bloomberg: BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins:

In five years I don’t think there’ll be a rea­son to have a tablet any­more. Maybe a big screen in your work­space, but not a tablet as such. Tablets them­selves are not a good busi­ness model.

Not for BlackBerry anyway.

Co.Design: Frog’s Chief Creative Officer Mark Rolston:

Curved dis­plays will drive the next five years of land­mark inventions.

Project Glass on YouTube: Google posted up an intro­duc­tory video explain­ing the basics of Glass. I believe one of the main advan­tages of Google Glass is hands-free: You no longer need your hands to do a lot of the things you did on a smart­phone. The touch UI looks fairly intu­itive to me, except that I have to wear a pair of geeky glasses, tap and rub its tem­ple. I don’t want to be tap­ping and rub­bing the Google Glass tem­ple; I’d rather be tap­ping and rub­bing the dis­play on my smart­phone. If I ever get over the geek­i­ness, this is what I want to be doing instead: “Glass, take a photo. And send it to Flickr.”

Horace Dediu:

My guess is that the largest con­tri­bu­tion to the “reduc­tion of mar­gin” is the increased cost of components.

But why did com­po­nent costs increase?

The pri­mary method of dri­ving down costs is to make more of the same thing. Apple is fail­ing to make more of the same thing. Take dis­plays for exam­ple: Both the iPhone 4 and the 4S made use of the same 3.5-inch LCD. When Apple intro­duced the iPhone 4S the com­pany pro­cured more 3.5-inch LCDs and drove down the cost of the dis­play for both the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 4. This didn’t hap­pen with the iPhone 5. Apple was not able to make more of the same thing and so the com­pany was not able to drive down the cost of the dis­play as much as it did in the past.

The Guardian: U.S. cit­i­zen Kenneth Bae has been impris­oned since November 2012 in North Korea for “crimes aimed to top­ple the DPRK”, which can carry a death penalty.

Luke Johnson, Trusted Reviews:

Having unveiled the first curved dis­play OLED TV at CES 2013 ear­lier this year, LG has sug­gested that the first curved screen TVs will launch in the UK later this year.

Curved OLED TVs? If I’m back far enough the cur­va­ture will end up being a dis­trac­tion. If LG wants to curve some­thing curve a LCD mon­i­tor, like the EA93.

Update 2013.04.28: According to Engadget, pre-orders for the LG 55EA9800 55-inch curved OLED TV starts April 29 at ₩15 mil­lion (~US$13,500) with ship­ments planned for June.

When the iPad mini 2 comes out it wouldn’t be out of char­ac­ter for Apple to reduce the price of the orig­i­nal iPad mini. To what price? I’d guess to around US$249.

During Apple’s earn­ings call, Tim Cook answered a ques­tion regard­ing the 5-inch smart­phone mar­ket. Cook cited fac­tors other than dis­play size cus­tomers value: res­o­lu­tion, color qual­ity, white bal­ance, bright­ness, reflec­tiv­ity, screen longevity, power con­sump­tion, porta­bil­ity, and com­pat­i­bil­ity with apps. He then stated “our com­peti­tors had some sig­nif­i­cant trade­offs in many of these areas in order to ship a larger dis­play.” I disagree.

Let’s start with res­o­lu­tion. Most, when men­tion­ing res­o­lu­tion, are refer­ring to pixel for­mat as in some­thing like 1920×1080. But even if Cook was refer­ring to the cor­rect def­i­n­i­tion of res­o­lu­tion as in den­sity, a larger dis­play does not need to make a res­o­lu­tion trade­off. On the con­trary: High end 5-inch smart­phones sport a pixel for­mat of 1920×1080 and that trans­lates to a res­o­lu­tion of 441 ppi. Both the pixel for­mat and the res­o­lu­tion is higher than the 4-inch iPhone 5.

Color qual­ity has no direct con­nec­tion to the size of the dis­play. What might have been on Cook’s mind is the ter­ri­ble color qual­ity of OLED dis­plays used by Samsung on many of its larger smart­phones like the Galaxy S III, IV, Note II, etc. But look at the HTC One or the LG Optimus G Pro; these smart­phones fea­ture large dis­plays with excel­lent color qual­ity. No trade­off there.

White bal­ance is ter­ri­ble on OLED dis­plays, but on high end large LCDs used in smart­phones such as the HTC One and the LG Optimus G Pro white bal­ance is just as good as the iPhone 5. Like color qual­ity, there is no direct con­nec­tion between white bal­ance and the size of the dis­play, unless it’s a Samsung OLED smart­phone. (This used to be true, not any more.)

I am con­vinced when Cook was answer­ing this ques­tion Samsung was on his mind. Who can blame him? Samsung is the only com­pany that sells mas­sive smart­phones with infe­rior dis­plays, sells a lot of them, and makes a lot of money. Apple’s biggest (and only?) com­peti­tor when it comes to smart­phones is Samsung.

Reflectivity is a big issue with touch devices. This again has noth­ing to do with dis­play size. Glossy cover glasses are one big rea­son why there is so much reflec­tiv­ity, but not size.

Screen longevity is not a con­cern for LCDs, but it is for OLED dis­plays. Most OLED dis­plays if used on a reg­u­lar basis and at high bright­ness will not last more than a cou­ple of years before the color becomes unbal­anced due to the blue OLED mate­r­ial dying out quicker than the red or green.

Power con­sump­tion is a valid trade­off, but smart­phones with larger dis­plays gen­er­ally have more space than smaller smart­phones for larger batteries.

Portability is also a valid trade­off, but almost half of the adult pop­u­la­tion car­ries some type of bag. For them the dif­fer­ence in porta­bil­ity between a 4-inch iPhone and a 5-inch Samsung is trivial.

Compatibility with apps is a weird one. A larger 5-inch iPhone with the same pixel for­mat of 1136×7640 would have no com­pat­i­bil­ity issues with cur­rent apps designed for the 4-inch iPhone 5. Larger fonts and larger icons would be great for an aging population.

Cook didn’t men­tion one-handed oper­a­tion as a trade­off because one-handed oper­a­tion on the iPhone 5 is dif­fi­cult for a lot of folks. If Apple had stuck to a 3:2 aspect ratio 3.5-inch dis­play for the iPhone 5 Cook could have men­tioned just two tradeoffs—one-handed oper­a­tion and com­pat­i­bil­ity with apps—and those would have made sense. But after three gen­er­a­tions of 3.5-inch iPhones Apple decided to make the dis­play big­ger and the trade­offs Cook men­tioned aren’t good enough rea­sons for why Apple shouldn’t make an even big­ger iPhone.

Shop at Amazon.com and support DisplayBlog