iPhone should come to the big screen in the fall

When questioned Tuesday during the second-quarter earnings call about Apple's stance on offering an iPhone with a 5-inch screen, he offered this iphone 5 accessories revealing glimpse into his thinking.

My view continues to be that the iPhone 5 has the absolute best display in the industry. And we always strive to create the very best display for our customers. ... some customers value large screen size; others value also other factors such as resolution, color quality, white balance, brightness, reflectivity, screen longevity, power consumption, portability, compatibility with apps, and many things.

Our competitors had made some significant trade-offs in many of these ipad mini accessories areas in order to ship a larger display; we would not ship a larger display iPhone while these trade-offs exist.fdfRFE23s

In other words, Cook seems to be saying that the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One, with the larger screens, are technologically inferior to the iPhone. No doubt, the iPhone has a splendid display. CNET's display expert David Katzmaier took a close look at the iPhone 5 and the earlier generation Galaxy S3, using a spectroradiometer, and found Apple's 4-inch screen superior. Below are his specific findings.

The iPhone can get much brighter. This leads to punchier whites and better handling of bright ambient-light situations, particularly outdoors or under bright overhead lights.

The Galaxy S3 has much deeper black levels. The AMOLED screen of the cheap iphone 4 cases can produce a much deeper, more realistic shade of black than the IPS (in-plane switching) LCD of the iPhone 5. This advantage shows up best under dim ambient-light conditions, such as outdoors at night or in a darker room.

Color on the iPhone is much more accurate. The iPhone hews significantly closer to the standard gamut used to produce most of the photos, videos, and other consumer content you'll view onscreen. That means it produces highly accurate colors. The Galaxy S3, on the other hand, has a gamut far beyond the standard, which oversaturates colors.