New iPhone 5 Screen Size; Would Bigger Be Unequivocally Better?

Now that a pretty strong consensus is gelling that there will be no iPhone 5 unveiling at the Worldwide Developers Conference next month, focus of speculation has turned once again to issues like what screen size the next iPhone will have.
One school of thought is that it could be a flexible OLED panel, possibly applied to a curved surface. In my estimation that’s highly unlikely, although there is evidence that Apple is taking a more active interest in OLED technology, and may well indeed do something with it in the mid-term future.
More probable are rumors, which have been on the go since last year, that the new iPhone will have a 4-inch or even larger display, re-ignited by the Wall Street Journal predicting a next-gen iPhone display of at least four inches, while Reuters more specifically projected 4.6 inches.
So, 4 inches or 4.6 inches, a larger display, whatever its exact dimensions, would be all good, right? Bigger is better in this context, n’est çe pas?

Well, in some aspects, yes, but this is also one of those “be careful what you wish for” matters. There are some objectively good reasons why Apple has kept the screen dimension at 3.5 inches through the iPhone’s first five generations. An obvious one it that it facilitates an ideally pocketable size and lower weight than a larger panel would. Another of course is that smaller displays enhance battery runtime per charge.
And in a blog last week, MacNewsWorld’s John P. Mello Jr. notes that increasing the iPhone’s display could present developers with new challenges as well as opportunities, citing Lisa Calkins, CEO of mobile applications developer Amadeus Consulting saying that while she doesn’t anticipate any problems with the functionality of apps written for a smaller screen running on larger displays, they may not look as good as they do on smaller panels.
Mello also quotes Yankee Group Research Director Carl Howe suggesting that if Apple gives the iPhone a bigger display, they’ll increase its height but not its width, which would allow legacy apps could run in letterbox format on the larger panel with no need for changes to the older app and no degradation in image quality.
Howe also thinks Apple will go to resolution-independent with iOS 6, because there will be more variation in screen sizes to accommodate in the future. For example not only legacy 3.5″ iPhone displays and whatever new larger iPhone panels might turn out to be, but according to the rumor mills, likely also a 7.85-inch iPad mini in the near future.
SeekingAlpha blogger Larry Gellar claims it’s a “fact” that the new iPhone’s display will be approximately 30% larger in viewing area, and that production of the new panels will commence in June at several OEM suppliers, with assembly of the new version beginning as early as in August.
I think that’s a plausible timeline that would allow the new iPhone to be released in mid to late September or more likely October, either on the anniversary of the 2011 iPhone 4S release, or to commemorate a year since Steve Jobs’s death.