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Sharp Announces 4K Smartphone Display
An anonymous reader writes: Japanese electronics giant Sharp has announced production of 5.5" displays with 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution. They'll hit the market next year. The display will have a pixel density of 806 PPI. It's not known yet which smartphone makers will build devices with these screens. The displays cost significantly more than a more typical 1080p or 1440p display, so they'll probably only make it into high-end phones. On the other hand, this will help to drive down prices for lower-resolution displays, so it could indirectly benefit everybody.
The curious quirk, in this case, is that you probably won't even be able to get a 'theoretically better; but not perceptably so and definitely not worth the price' product; you'll almost inevitably get a worse one.
Any phone/tablet SoC with claims to being remotely high end is already some mixture of thermally constrained and deliberately crippled to save the device's battery life. If you demand their full performance, they'll throttle within minutes; and if they somehow had the thermal headroom to avoid that, they'd flatten the battery in a some egregiously short time.
Assuming reasonably equal tech(ie. not a 1920x1080 phone from two years ago against a phone from next year with this screen) the higher resolution device will have worse battery life(or a visibly larger battery) and be at a greater risk of annoying frame rate/responsiveness issues in any applications that try to do complex GPU work at native resolution. Some amount of this is accepted, since visible giant eyeball-slashing pixels suck; but the returns on graphical prettiness diminish, while the power and thermal costs just keep on scaling...
At least audiophile nonsense is generally good at what it does, if you ignore the price tag and the nonsense; this will be actively worse than a similar device based on a slightly less ambitious screen.