A high res screen becomes more and more important as we move towards a more friendly (and universal) mobile UI)

The ratio between screen size and resolution becomes smaller, but you point the good question : readibility (don’t know if it is correct in english, sorry).

On my Sony U3 (oldie, but goodie) I have 1024×768 pixels on a 6.4″ screen : it is nice and good, but smaller text size would not be better for me…

VEGA VEGA VEGA!!!!

I agree, just use a larger font. I’m guessing that a higher res means more energy will be used, but at that size of a screen it’s probably not very noticeable on battery life. If the software is good at scaling images, I see no problem with such a high resolution.

Just make your fonts larger!

You know, I think that higher resolutions are actually a good direction to go in. You might think it’s wasteful but if we can double or quadruple the resolution at the same cost point (granted tis will take a while), it will be worth it.

I think most people are trained to think that higher resolutions mean smaller and harder to read icons and text, but if the fonts and images take the same amount of screen space but just at a higher crisper resolution, then we have nothing to lose.

Hopefully, in the future, operating systems start thinking in terms of inches or milimeters to define the sizes of text and images on screen and when it comes time to get rendered it looks for the dpi of the display in order to tell how to scale it for the final rendering.

in this way, a 800×480 resolution on a 2.5 inch display would just render the screen at 321 dpi and a 240×320 display would render it at 137 dpi.