For iOS6 multi-tasking on the 5th generation iPhone, if the rumors of a ~170 pixel taller display are true, I would like to see a persistent dock mode when you activate the multi-tasking switcher. So basically you double-home-tap and the app resizes down ~170 pixels and the dock appears. The dock stays on the bottom of the screen as you switch between applications and use them. When you're done with your little flurry of heavy multi-tasking you double-home-tap to hide the dock again. This should also work nicely on an iPad sized display. For the ways I multi-task on iOS this would be almost a perfect system. Most of the time I'm jumping into another app for a very brief stay -- just long enough to copy something, reference something, or act on an event, then I'm returning to whatever I was doing. On the iPhone this presently requires a ridiculous number of home button taps. On the iPad using the multi-touch gestures require a lot of swiping. The Mission Control style switching this article suggests would be OK but I feel like it would still require a lot of extra taps and swipes.
"We have one App Store. We have one phone with one screen size, one resolution. So it’s pretty simple if you’re a developer.”
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Interesting! I regard this as a pretty strong hint.
I think they could make a 4 inch display and just keep the current resolution and aspect ratio. It is high enough. Who cares if it is 326 or only 299 dpi? But of course I don't think Apple works that way and they won't make something so highly advertised like the Retina display "worse".
I'm not a fan of huge displays but 4" is actually pretty tame by today's standards. Apple may have come up with the perfect screen size for a SmartPhone circa 2007 but today the vast majority of SmartPhones sold in the world have larger displays so clearly 3.5" cannot be the only perfect size. I do think they have stood by 3.5" in part to see if this trend was just a temporary divergence. Now that is has endured for a couple years it's hard to ignore.
The other factor here is I think as Apple has scaled iOS to include more features they have begun to hit the wall of physical UI space. Let's use Safari as an example. If Apple wanted to add 2 new major features to Safari that had to be quickly accessible where would they even put them? The UI is just about full. They would have to increasingly rely on pop-out controls and other less-than-obvious UI tricks which adds extra taps. The situation is even worse when the keyboard is active taking up half the screen. With the status bar and maybe a visible app toolbar you have about a quarter of the screen available. Reading text messages on an iPhone has actually become painful. You can rarely see the entire message without scrolling or hiding the keyboard. A taller screen fixes that. They may just really need an extra ~170 pixels of height to keep scaling these apps with new features that require UI space.
I don't have particularly large hands, yet have no issue with 4.3" screens. I wouldn't go back to anything smaller—the larger text (or ability to fit more text/contents of the same physical size) is worth the occasional thumb stretching (not that I have a lot of reason to ever reach to one of the top corners on my screen, anyway).
As a vision researcher, I think that size should be measured in degrees of visual angle, not inches. In this respect, there's no difference between a large screen and a small screen with the same number of pixels, and it's easier to hold your phone closer to your face than to sprout larger thumbs and buy new pants.
If there's a restriction of the iPhone's small screen, I think it's actually that you can't have as many touch targets as you could with a larger screen.
That's certainly true as far as perceived size goes, but I don't find it practical at all. There's a big usability difference between, say, reading while holding my phone at arm's length while resting my arm on a table and having to hold a smaller phone closer to my face to get the perceived font size to be the same. Holding stuff closer to your face just isn't as pleasant.
