GSM Arena: The Samsung Galaxy S4 sports a 4.99-inch Super AMOLED dis­play with a 1920×1080 pixel for­mat. If the sub-pixel struc­ture is RGB then res­o­lu­tion can be cal­cu­lated at 441 ppi, but there is a chance the sub-pixel struc­ture might not be RGB and there­fore res­o­lu­tion not as high as 441 ppi.

Update 2013.04.24: Reviews are in, and the sub-pixel struc­ture is not RGB. According to AnandTech, Samsung is using yet another sub-pixel for­mat for the Galaxy S4:

There’s still a bias toward more green sub­pix­els than blue or red, this isn’t an RGB stripe at all, but instead of the pre­vi­ous RG,BG lay­out we see this off­set pat­tern with green on one line, then blue and red on another line. Interestingly enough the blue sub­pixel appears to be a square, and red and green appear to be cir­cles, with the dif­fer­ence in area pos­si­bly off­set­ting the lumi­nous effi­ciency of each material.

David Pierce, The Verge:

The GS4′s 5-inch, 1920 x 1080 dis­play is big, beau­ti­ful, and seri­ously eye-catching. The lat­ter is par­tially a bad thing: the S4 uses a Super AMOLED panel like many of Samsung’s phones, and like many of Samsung’s phones it dis­plays overly con­trasted and vibrant col­ors. Those col­ors may not be accu­rate — reds and oranges absolutely explode off the screen, whether they should or not — but they cer­tainly catch your eye. And with a ridicu­lous 441-pixels-per-inch, even the PenTile dis­play matrix I usu­ally loathe causes no problems.

Catchy ver­sus accu­rate col­ors? I pre­fer the later. The res­o­lu­tion of 441 ppi is not cor­rect since ppi assumes a RGB sub-pixel struc­ture. I’m also not cer­tain this ver­sion of the PenTile sub-pixel struc­ture exhibits no prob­lems; we will know for sure when Raymond Soneira pub­lishes an in-depth dis­play tech­nol­ogy shoot-out arti­cle com­par­ing the Galaxy S4′s OLED dis­play tomor­row morning.

Update 2013.04.25: And here it is. The defin­i­tive word from Ray Soneira:

But for dig­i­tally gen­er­ated fine text and graph­ics with pre­cise pixel lay­outs the eye can visu­ally detect the reduced num­ber of red and blue sub-pixels unless the num­ber of red and blue sub-pixels per inch is very high. And it is for the Galaxy S4 – there are 312 red and blue sub-pixels per inch, which is only a few per­cent lower than Apple’s bench­mark 326 PPI iPhone retina dis­play. Visually the Galaxy S4 PenTile dis­play deliv­ers excel­lent visual sharp­ness across the board.

There you have it: When it comes to visual sharp­ness the PenTile OLED dis­play on the Samsung Galaxy S4 is about as good as the RGB IPS LCD on the iPhone. The result of the shoot-out? A tie:

The iPhone 5 is sig­nif­i­cantly brighter than the Galaxy S4, par­tic­u­larly for screens with mostly peak white back­grounds. Its color cal­i­bra­tion is a bit bet­ter, although the Galaxy S4 has a more accu­rate white. The Galaxy S4 has a much big­ger screen, higher res­o­lu­tion, higher PPI, much darker blacks, and bet­ter screen uni­for­mity than the iPhone 5.

Color accu­racy has always been a sour point for OLED dis­plays, but the Galaxy S4 at least has an option: If color and image accu­racy are most impor­tant Soneira rec­om­mends Movie Mode, which pro­vides “very nice, pleas­ing, and accu­rate col­ors and pic­ture quality.

Apple iPhone dis­play engi­neers have some work to do: improve white accu­racy, deepen blacks, and enhance screen uniformity.

David S. Cohen, Variety:

Odds are that before the end of the year, one or more will decide that the mea­ger returns from 35mm screens sim­ply don’t jus­tify the cost of prints, par­tic­u­larly for their tent­pole releases.

There are almost 40,000 screens in the U.S. and Canada, and 86% have con­verted to dig­i­tal accord­ing to the National Association of Theatre Owners.

Bono, TIME:

What the com­peti­tors don’t seem to under­stand is you can­not get peo­ple this smart to work this hard just for money. Jony is Obi-Wan. His team are Jedi whose nobil­ity depends on the pur­suit of greatness [...]

via John Gruber. Min-Jeong Lee, The Wall Street Journal:

LG Display Co. swung to a net profit in the first quar­ter as tablet screen sales to Apple Inc. increased, and ana­lysts said the South Korean dis­play maker’s for­tunes this year will be closely tied to demand for the U.S. company’s gadgets.

This is how I under­stand the analy­sis by Min-Jeong Lee: LG Display lost money in Q4’12, but sold more LCDs geared for Apple’s iPad or iPad mini (or both?) and that’s why the South Korea-based dis­play man­u­fac­turer made a profit in Q1’13. And the only way for LGD to con­tinue gen­er­at­ing prof­its in 2013 is for Apple’s iPads to sell well and for Apple to con­tinue procur­ing iPad dis­plays from LGD.

Here’s a dif­fer­ent take on the same news. Miyoung Kim, Reuters:

LG Display Co Ltd reported its small­est profit since it returned to the black in the sec­ond quar­ter of last year, as demand for iPhone and iPad screens from Apple weak­ened amid con­cerns the U.S. com­pany is los­ing its lus­ter in the mobile device market.

Here’s what I think Miyoung Kim is try­ing to say: Apple is con­cerned the U.S. is los­ing its lus­ter in the mobile device mar­ket. So the company’s demand for iPhone and iPad LCDs from LGD weak­ened. And that’s why LGD’s profit in Q1’13 was the small­est since Q2’12.

How can both of these analy­ses be true? Let’s see if we can make sense out of these seemly con­tra­dic­tory analy­ses. LGD’s sales of iPad LCDs to Apple increased. The por­tion of iPad LCD sales to Apple grew rel­a­tive to the por­tion of iPhone LCD sales to Apple. LGD’s sales of iPhone LCDs to Apple decreased. Because LGD’s sales of iPad LCDs to Apple grew the South Korea-based dis­play man­u­fac­turer was able to eck out a profit in Q1’13, but because LGD’s sales of iPhone LCDs to Apple declined prof­its could have been bet­ter but weren’t. I think that makes sense, doesn’t it?

MacRumors: New pho­tos sug­gest the next iPad will sport a design inspired by the iPad mini with nar­rower side bezels.

Update 2013.04.18: Eric Slivka, MacRumors:

Kuo expects mass pro­duc­tion and ship­ments of the new iPad to ramp up in the August-September time­frame, with the device reg­is­ter­ing roughly 15% thin­ner and 25% lighter than the cur­rent full-size iPad.

CNN: That’s quar­ter over quar­ter com­pared to the fourth quar­ter of 2012. Year over year Verizon’s iPhone acti­va­tions grew 25%.

According to Wikpedia, the iPhone 4S was announced on October 4, 2011, become avail­able for pre-order on October 7, and was avail­able for in-store sales on October 14.

According to Wikipedia, the iPhone 5 was announced on September 12, 2012, became avail­able for pre-order on September 14, and was avail­able for in-store sales on September 21.

Comparing fourth quar­ters, the iPhone 5 had 14 extra days than the iPhone 4S. One way to look at this is to assume more of the folks who wanted the iPhone 5 bought it in the fourth quar­ter, leav­ing less of those who wanted the iPhone 5 to buy in the first quar­ter of 2013.

It also might be more than before folks who wanted the iPhone 5 bought it for other car­ri­ers such as AT&T and Sprint. And some have been wait­ing for the iPhone 5 to become avail­able on T-Mobile, which started sell­ing the iPhone 5 on April 12, 2013.

Not every­one was happy about the iPhone 5′s redesign, but to think the iPhone 5 is not sell­ing well because of a steeper drop in acti­va­tions quar­ter over quar­ter in the first quar­ter of 2013 com­pared to the drop in acti­va­tions quar­ter over quar­ter in the first quar­ter of 2012 is prob­a­bly pre­ma­ture. We’ll have to wait and see how the iPhone 5 sold at other car­ri­ers in the U.S. and world­wide to make a defin­i­tive con­clu­sion. We will find out on April 23, 2013 when Apple announces cal­en­dar year first quar­ter 2013 results.

Toshiba: The Toshiba KIRAbook is like a 13.3-inch retina MacBook Pro stuffed into a 13.3-inch MacBook Air. Unlike the 16:10 2560×1600 13-inch retina MacBook Pro the KIRAbook’s 13.3-inch LCD sports a 16:9 aspect ratio and a 2560×1440 pixel for­mat. Resolution is an impres­sive 221 ppi (Toshiba states a res­o­lu­tion of 217 ppi, which doesn’t make sense), but falls slightly behind the Chromebook Pixel’s 239 ppi and the 13.3-inch retina MacBook Pro’s 227.

David Pierce at The Verge reports view­ing angles are “pretty bad”. I can’t under­stand bad view­ing angles on a US$1600 pre­mium note­book where the dis­play is one of its main attractions.

But are view­ing angles impor­tant on a note­book? I don’t move around much when I’m on my 17-inch MacBook Pro. I sup­pose most don’t. So what good are excel­lent view­ing angles? Well, let me put it this way: When I’m approach­ing my MacBook Pro from an angle and if the LCD had poor view­ing angles with washed out col­ors I wouldn’t have good feel­ings about it.

Google: With Google Glass you can take 5MP pho­tos and 720p videos, but “to ensure the opti­mal expe­ri­ence” images and videos should “tar­get a 640×360 pixel resolution”?

Horace Dediu:

Assuming fur­ther that “other” ven­dors have the same prof­itabil­ity ratio as the top 5 com­bined yields a fig­ure of 45% “profit cap­ture of PC mar­ket” for Apple. This is not as good as its per­for­mance in the phone mar­ket, where Apple has about 72%, but it’s not bad.

Not bad.

Chris Welch, The Verge:

Google’s Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President Patrick Pichette today said that prod­ucts in Motorola’s pipeline are “not really to the stan­dards that what Google would say is wow — inno­v­a­tive, transformative.”

Perhaps a good kick in the butt will get Motorola going again.

Update 2013.04.16: Shara Tibken, c|net:

“What I’d advise to do with Motorola is wait and see with the next gen­er­a­tion of tech­nol­ogy,” Schmidt said. “It’s very, very impressive.”

Less than two months ago Pichette wasn’t impressed with what Motorola had in the pipeline. Now Schmidt is very impressed. Which is it? Schmidt can at times exag­ger­ate so I’ll go with Pichette.

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