Rumors:
There are lots of entertaining rumors regarding the next generation of Tablets and Smartphones most are made up nonsense based on phony tips. Here is our objective technical analysis of three popular rumors:
First Rumor: The next generation Tablets will have OLED Organic LED displays. Right now this can be ruled out based on cost and insufficient production volume, especially in the case of the iPad. OLEDs are improving rapidly, but currently they have lower peak brightness and lower power efficiency than LCDs both of which are very important for Tablets because of their relatively large screens. So, unlikely for the next generation, but undoubtedly coming in the near future
Second Rumor: The next generation iPad will quadruple the number of screen pixels with a resolution of 2048x1536. This would undoubtedly be a great marketing move but its technically an overkill and comes with a large penalty in cost and performance requiring significantly more processing power, more memory and battery power, plus lowering the display brightness efficiency. Hopefully display pixels will not follow the same path as the camera Mega Pixel wars because like them more pixels lowers performance after reaching a certain point. Apple had to double the resolution on the iPhone 3GS because its 480x320 resolution was very low. The iPad is starting with a much higher 1024x768 so Apps hard coded for the iPad 1 and 2 can be rescaled easily by the OS up to the new iPad 3 resolution.
Third Rumor: An iPad Retina Display to make the iPad 3 a Retina Display does not require the same pixels per inch (ppi) as the iPhone 4 Retina Display because it is typically held much further away from the eye, whose visual sharpness is based on angular rather than linear resolution. The iPad is typically held 15-18 inches away as opposed to the iPhone 4s 12-15 inches. As a result, to meet the 300 ppi Retina Display specification made by Steve Jobs at WWDC for the iPhone 4, an iPad Retina Display would need only 240 ppi. So an iPad Retina Display could start anywhere above 1862x1397 pixels. That is still a major overkill that carries a significant performance and cost penalty so it would be primarily a marketing ploy. See below for our recommendation.
Recommendations:
Here are a few generic recommendations for the next generation(s) of Tablets: There are quite a few things that manufacturers (including Apple) can do to improve their Tablet displays to stay competitive in this extremely competitive category. For advanced and proprietary recommendations and optimizations, manufacturers should contact DisplayMate Technologies.
First Recommendation: Reduce the Screen Reflectance using an anti-reflection screen coating together with a surface haze layer to cut down on mirror reflections. It will then be necessary to eliminate the air gap between the LCD and cover glass by optically bonding them together.
Second Recommendation: Based on the above discussion for an iPad Retina Display, a good technical and marketing compromise for Tablet resolution is 200 ppi. A 1600x1200 9.7 inch iPad display works out to 206 ppi. For the 10.1 inch Android Tablets 1792x1120 works out to 209 ppi. Image sharpness can be considerably enhanced even further with sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but even without it the Tablet displays will appear very sharp at 200 ppi.
Third Recommendation: Carefully increase the display Color Gamut and image color saturation by managing the light spectrum of the Backlight and the Intensity Scale Gamma.
Fourth Recommendation: The Ambient Light Sensors and Automatic Brightness Controls on all Smartphones and Tablets are very poorly implemented. That wastes precious battery power and also causes eye strain. See our BrightnessGate article, which also proposes an improved display User Interface.
