How the next-generation iPhone with taller display may position landscape keyboard

Mark Gurman | Aug 9 2012 - 8:11 pm PT

Earlier this week, we broke the news that Apple’s upcoming version of iOS 6 is fully scalable and aware of taller, larger iPhone displays. The display resolution of 1136 x 640, a resolution we first reported in May that Apple is testing for future iPhones, shows a seemingly perfectly tweaked version of iOS 6. As we revealed earlier, this means five rows of home screen icons and tweaked native app user-interfaces.

We have been playing around more with the iOS simulator, which we tweaked to work on different resolutions, and we noticed some additional notable UI changes for the taller resolution. As we noted several months ago, the 1136 x 640 resolution on the next-generation iPhone will mean that the display comes in just around at a 16:9 proportion, an uncommon resolution for a mobile phone. Because of this, some have wondered how certain user-interface elements would be presented.

Many interface elements that are displayed while using the iPhone in vertical orientation will remain unchanged. The most important element, perhaps, is the iPhone’s keyboard. In portrait/vertical view, the keyboard on the next-generation iPhone will likely not change.

However, in landscape, it will:

According to screenshots submitted to us by iOS specialists Nick Frey and Sonny Dickson, the taller iPhone display will provide slightly larger keyboard keys. As you can see in the image above, the keys for the longer iPhone screen are slightly larger and stretched out. However, the keyboard itself does not get stretched from side to side of the display, noting that this is not a simple keyboard stretch for the higher resolution, but an intentionally tweaked keyboard design.

However, all of this information comes just from iOS 6’s iPhone Simulator application on the Mac. While we’re confident that our evidence shows that the Simulator has knowledge of a taller iPhone screen resolution, it is possible that Apple chooses to go with a different option for displaying the landscape keyboard.

For good measure, though, we tested the landscape keyboard at different resolutions. Lining up with our tests prior to reporting on the tweaked home screen and application interfaces, the keyboard interface is not placed correctly at different resolutions.