iPhone 5 four-inch screen discovered?

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Rumors

The rumor-mill is once again a-churning over the possibility of a larger-sized iPhone that could compete against its beefier Android cousins. Although Apple CEO Steve Jobs has previously stated his thoughts on the matter -- "No one's going to buy" a larger iPhone—a new picture from an unidentified Chinese iPhone parts reseller offers a tantalizing tease for a larger iPhone to come.

If the picture holds true, then the iPhone 5 would retain the same external look and feel as its predecessors—at least, in terms of how its user-facing panel is constructed. The home button might not be going anywhere, but it would now be centered beneath a screen that's been increased from 3.5 inches across to 4.

Said unidentified company might throw more pictures up, including shots of the rear casing for the allegedly larger iPhone—there's just no indication as to what the timeline for the leaked shots might be. Or, for that matter, just how accurate they are.

Digitimes has previously reported that Apple is planning on bulking up to a four-inch iPhone (screen size, that is) for its fifth-generation device.

"The component suppliers noted that the production lines for Apple's next generation iPhone have begun testing, and Apple is interesting in expanding the screen size to 4-inches to support the tablet PC market as the vendor only has a 9.7-inch iPad in the market," Digitimes writes.

However, we've analyzed these claims previously, and DisplayMate's President Raymond Soneira notes that a larger-sized iPhone 5 would drop the "Retina Display" resolution of the device below the 300 pixels-per-inch (PPI) that Apple uses as a qualifier for the description.

"I think for marketing reasons Apple would not drop down to 285 ppi after making the big stink about 326 ppi," Soneira says. "If they stayed with 326, they'd have to increase the [horizontal] resolution to 1,097 as opposed to 960 to preserve that same pixels per inch, but a lot of apps would not be happy with that."

But the question begs: How long would Apple be content with a 3.5-inch device when its chief competitor, Android, lives on mobile devices far larger? Jobs might not think size is everything in the mobile market, but what about consumers?

This article, written by David Murphy, originally appeared on PCMag.com and is republished on Gear Live with the permission of Ziff Davis, Inc..