Over the past few months, a popular topic throughout the blogosphere and even various news outlets, has been Apple’s next-generation iPhone. Of course, during this time, the majority of news and rumors were focused on a leaked design that sported a vertically enhanced screen and a two-tone back with a smaller dock connector port.
Today, 9to5Mac discovered that Apple’s iOS developer simulator has built in iOS 6 support for a display with a resolution of 1,136-by-640. Compared to the iPhone 4S’ resolution of 960-by-640, the newly discovered screen size is approximately 176 pixels taller than that of the iPhone 4S.
Thanks to some tweaks to the iOS Simulator application that is included in the iOS development tools, we were able to run the simulator at the rumored next-generation iPhone display resolution of 640 x 1136. We did this running both the current public release of iOS 5.1 and the upcoming iOS 6.0 The iOS 5.1 simulator displayed the home screen with a stretched set of four rows of icons. On the other hand, iOS 6 displayed five complete rows – as our sources said Apple was testing for taller iPhone displays.
As depicted in the above image, the new 1,136-by-640 resolution was tested through Apple’s simulator on public iOS 5.1 release and the latest beta release of iOS 6. While not entirely obvious, the screenshot of iOS 5.1 appears to be less crammed The current iPhone 4S’ springboard is more accurately represented by the iOS 6 screenshot – just without the extra row of icons.
The resolution doesn’t scale properly when tested with iOS 5.1, it simply adds more vertical space between icons. However, as mentioned above, when the same resolution is is tested with iOS 6, it scales properly by adding an extra row of icons.
Could this be a new piece of evidence that officially confirms the next-generation iPhone’s screen resolution, or could it simply mean that Apple was – at the very least – testing a device with a 1,136-by-640 display? Stay tuned for complete coverage pertaining to Apple and their upcoming iPhone.
