TheDuperTech

HTC has the world’s first five-inch 1080p phone

According to Apple, a display deserves the Retina moniker if its pixel density is so high that your eye is unable to discern the individual pixels. In the case of a smartphone, Retina means at least 300 pixels per inch. The Retina display on the iPhone 4/4S/5 has 326 pixels per inch.

Now, imagine a five-inch phone that packs 440 pixels per square inch, featuring the native full HD resolution of 1,920-by-1,080 pixels. That’s exactly what the ailing handset maker HTC set out to create with a new upcoming phone dubbed the J Butterfly…

Apple’s Retina display has served as one of the defining hardware features of iPhones since the iPhone 4. Even a year after the iPhone 4 had been released in the summer of 2010, competition had trouble producing a matching display.

But increasingly pixel density is becoming a weapon against Apple and this new HTC phone is a typical example.

The Verge had a chance to play with HTC’s new phone in Tokyo today.

The J Butterfly features a five-inch Super LCD 3 display, a successor to the Super LCD 2 screen on the HTC One X. At 440 ppi, vivid color reproduction and the slightly curved edges, this phone sets a new bar in terms of clarity and display quality.

Other features include a quad-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 processor, 2GB of RAM, an eight-megapixel camera with an f/2.0 lens, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and a body that’s just 9.1mm thin.

It’s not that Apple is too obsessed with smartphone screen sizes or resolution, but evidently it’s been featuring the Retina display prominently in advertising.

A full HD display like that on the J Butterfly give you native 1080p video playback without letterboxing or downsampling. Here’s a comparison of the HTC phone’s display versus the iPhone’s Retina display.

So, when’s Apple gonna do a 1080p iPhone?

The technology obviously exists though yield rates and production volume of such a high-resolution mobile display may not at this point satisfy Apple’s insatiable appetite.

Other concerns involve hardware requirements and battery consumption because a 1080p display has 2.85 times more pixels than the iPhone 5′s 1,136-by-640 display, requiring a much more powerful GPU to drive the pixels.

Certainly Apple must be thinking about a 1080p iPhone and I think it won’t be too long before we get there.

What do you think?