At first I was excited to hear that the iPhone 5 will offer more screen real estate than past generations, but now that the rumors are reporting a taller screen I’m not all that jazzed.
Apparently the new screen is supposed to be taller. How much taller? Tall enough to hold one more row of apps on your home screen. Before I heard about the new dimensions I was into the change. The iPhone could use a real makeover, and since most of what I do on the iPhone is read, a bigger display could be really nice.
So nice, in fact, that I wouldn’t mind the fact that my little fingers probably won’t be able to stretch across to the furthest corners of the iPhone screen anymore. I’d miss the ability to press that top right send button without the aid of a second hand, but more reading real estate would make for a fair trade off. At least that’s what I thought at first.
After all, I’m a heavy PDF reader and like any other person who reads PDFs you know the iPhones biggest shortcoming isn’t height but width. Getting all the words in a single line to fit onto your iPhone screen results in about size 6 font, but sadly, I sometimes prefer this eye-straining size to the motion sickness induced side-scrolling of regular sized PDFs.
Unfortunately for PDF readers like me, the new 640 x 1136 screen isn’t going to help this issue at all. Think it’ll be better when you flip your phone 90 degrees? That doesn’t help much either because when you’re reading a lot, it really blows to have to scroll every time you’ve read four measly lines.
The only way around this is to convert all your PDFs to .epub format (so the text wraps with the width of the screen). If you think about it, this just about the best thing Apple could hope for. More people using their proprietary filetype means more control for Apple.
This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about in regard to iOS and OS X. Mountain Lion makes you go out of your way to install apps outside of Apple’s proprietary app store. If Apple takes this a step further and locks down my Mac the way they do the iPhone I’m saying right here and right now that I’m done, switching, and over Apple.
I type this from a MacBook Pro retina display that I adore, but Apple’s proprietary attitude toward computing could very easily cross the line. I hope it doesn’t (gosh I hope it doesn’t), but I’m a little worried it might.