Analyst: iPhone 5 to Boast 4.08-Inch Display with 500-nit Brightness

Analyst Mingchi Kuo, employed by KGI Research, is telling his own clients that his company expects the iPhone 5 “to feature a 4.08-inch in-cell IPS panel screen with a display resolution of 1136 x 640 and 500-nit brightness.”

It is unclear why Kuo felt anyone needed an update on the luminosity front. But regardless of the amount of lumens coming out of Apple’s next iPhone, Kuo also has a few words to say about the changed resolution.

Apparently, many people are worried that the bigger screen will pose development problems. Not Kuo. He thinks the situations is really simple. In theory.

A key takeaway from his note is that, “If developers don’t want to adapt software for iPhone 5, the App can still successfully show on the screen except for the blackened areas on two flanks [...] If developers decide they want to make the necessary amendments to make things look good, the cost will be kept to a minimum thanks to the same old horizontal resolution.”

He strengthens his argument, noting that “a larger iPhone 5 will have a different screen resolution, but the same horizontal resolution of 640 [pixels] as iPhone 4S will help minimize development cost.”

Speaking of the battery, Kuo predicts Apple will employ a pack boasting 1,400 mAh - nothing bigger or more potent because, even though Apple is making the phone longer, they’ll also want to make it thinner to keep up with the trends, according to the analyst.

Indeed, much of what Kuo says in this research note (obtained by AppleInsider) makes sense from a technical standpoint.

Then again, letterboxing over half a million apps is not the ideal experience Apple has in mind, surely. Perhaps there will be some new development tools to help scale up third-party apps with ease.