If you think the ultra-sharp Quad HDdisplays on today's state-of-the-art smartphones are as good as it gets, think again. According to Qualcomm, who builds many of today's key technologies in mobile, 4K smartphones are just around the corner, and they'll take pixel counts to an — arguably absurd — new level.
When Apple debuted the iPhone 4 back in 2010, it introduced the idea of "Retina"displays, which loosely means a display with a resolution so sharp that the pixels disappear to the naked eye, at least at normal viewing distances. Since then, every smartphone manufacturer has responded with ultra-high-res screens on their flagship phones, sometimes going way beyond what was once considered excessive.
The standard in flagship phone displays hit 1080p (the same resolution as an HDTV) about a year ago, and the top phones rolling out of factories in Asia now sport Quad HD displays: screens with 2,560 x 1,440 — or 3.7 million pixels. Unless you're literally holding the phone right up to your face, you'll never be able to see a single one of them.
That's a lot of pixels, but just you wait. Qualcomm says phones with 4K resolution — the same as today's most advanced televisions — are coming in 2015.
The dawn of 4K in phones isn't just about how many pixels are on the screen. To Qualcomm in particular, it's more about supporting a world where 4K is the new standard for video, which involves everything from the chip to the compression technologies used to transmit the files.
" Where 4K will really take off is when you think of it being enabled by an ecosystem," says Qualcomm Technologies Co-President Murthy Renduchintala. "Concepts are going to drive it. It's not going to be the phone screen that's going to be the promoting factor in 4K. It's going to be what you want to do with data that's captured on your phone in 4K, and what you want to do with distributing data."
That ecosystem is already forming now that phones like the Sony Xperia Z3 andSamsung Galaxy Note 4 able to capture 4K video. While the footage gives users something to watch on their 4K TVs other than House of Cards, it exacerbates issues with bandwidth and storage. Many phones still have just 16GB (or even 8GB) of storage — perilously little when the resolution is 3,840 x 2,160 for every frame.
"A large part of the content you want in 4K, you can literally store at the 'edge' of your network, in a cached state, without having to reach back for those large file sizes in real time," explains Renduchintala. "You don't have to [accept] latency. You can — opportunistically — download bucketloads of content and have it sitting on a storage network that's independent. Then the problem becomes, 'How do I distribute that data around my network, which may be my house."
4K support on phones will also help mobile gaming keep up with consoles. As games begin to embrace 4K, the phones will be able to keep up, with (presumably) less need to "dumb down" functionality or gameplay on a mobile device — even if the actual screen being used is an external one.
"If you get an Android or iOS game in 4K, it'll give you the same immersive experience as a console game, but it [may] cost $1.99," says Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm Technologies' other co-president. "It could be a device that interacts with your TV; mobile is like your own remote control — you generate content, you transmit content, you have content streamed to you. But then you need to deal with 4K data processing on the mobile phone, and that's the problem we're solving."
As for the phone itself, the one most direct application of 4K resolution is virtual reality. Some VR products, including the Samsung Gear VR, use a smartphone display as the main screen. In that very specific (and currently tiny) use case, the pixels are just an inch from your eye, and the more resolution, the better.
VR aside, there probably isn't much justification from a user-experience standpoint for 4K displays on phones. Having tested several phones, I've found the improvement in resolution that Quad HD has over full HD to be discernible, but only barely, and for extremely remote situations (such as the incredibly precise handwriting experience on the Galaxy Note 4).
Still, it's hard to argue with the crux of Qualcomm's vision: that 4K video will soon be the standard in high-quality video, and phones — which are rapidly becoming the main gateway to our digital lives — will need to support it. You might call it overkill, but to the future, it's just Tuesday.
BONUS: 4K and 1080p compared
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