I’ve been a big proponent of the idea that Apple will be putting out a high-resolution iPad soon. But it looks like they’re getting beat to the punch by Acer and perhaps others, according to some scraps of information gleaned from an XML file from Acer’s website.
The A700 and A701, found by Notebook Italia, were listed on Acer’s support site, and the listing is in fact still there as of this writing. The main features are NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 chipset and an impressive 1920×1200 display resolution. That is in fact the resolution of the 24″ display I’m typing this on right now.
The benefits of such a resolution are easy to see, but there’s a reason we expected a major jump by Apple to 2048×1536: simple 2x scaling. When icons and graphical elements have to be blown up, it really helps with image quality if the blown up size is a whole number multiple of the original, so the pixels can just be doubled and no filtering is required.
Vector graphics obviate this requirement to some extent, but right now this resolution jump may be a little awkward. Many high-resolution Android phones have to add little borders to the icons to make them the right size, since scaling them would make them look blurry. Hopefully Acer and/or Google have addressed this problem already, but we won’t know for sure until we see the device. The size is also unspecified, but I doubt very much they’ll go very far over 10 inches. A quick search didn’t turn up any obvious sellers of displays of this size and resolution, so the manufacturer is also unknown.
Still, I’m loving this increased resolution. I’ve always felt it would enable a lot once we all move past visible pixels, and it’s good to see that hardware change really starting to take place. Hopefully more companies, Apple included, will follow Acer’s example over the next year. While spec-mongering is less important every year, resolution is one thing we can all appreciate.
[via SlashGear]