Classic xkcd. Gotta love it. And it’s actually very relevant to a research presentation I’m working on. More on that later…

You may have seen a Tweet from me mentioning that the backlight on my iPhone 3G finally kicked the bucket. I used it for two weeks and couldn’t stand it anymore, so I started thinking about alternatives.

I’ve got an old Motorola AT&T GoPhone I bought back when I was doing a lot of biking and needed an expendable backup phone, but I hate using it for two reasons: (1) it doesn’t have any of my contacts, and (2) I hate texting with the tiny numeric keypad. However, it dawned on me yesterday that I haven’t even been using my phone for most of my texting in the last several weeks. More often than not I’ve used the excellent free Google Voice service on my recently-mobile-data-plan-enabled iPad. It further dawned on me that I can do almost everything I do with my phone on my iPad instead, except for actually making and receiving calls.

So, I’ve dusted off that old GoPhone and swapped my SIM card in there. When I need to make a call now, I bring up Google Voice on my iPad, click Call, choose the contact, and instruct Google Voice to ring my cell phone. It’s actually a great little setup and I’m sure it will serve me fine until Apple finally decides to release iPhone 5.

Why is virtually nothing on the web justified and hyphenated? Grab any book off the shelf in your home or office and I’ll bet you it’s justified and hyphenated. In fact, I challenge you to find me a book that isn’t.

Hundreds of years of making books and it seems to me everyone agrees justified and hyphenated is the way to go. Now all of a sudden it’s controversial whether or not it’s really better for reading, easier on the eyes, &c. The technology exists to easily hyphenate any website or app, ((For example, I use the excellent hyphenator.js right here on this site.)) but many developers either aren’t aware it’s possible or choose not to do it because they somehow think ragged-right is better.

And I’m not just talking about average blogs or news websites. I’m looking squarely at sites like Instapaper and Readability, and apps like Flipboard and Articles, who claim to offer a superior reading experience (and for the most part I think they do), yet continue to feature rag-right text. I’m also looking at e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle or Apple’s iBooks, ((Although, for all I know Kindle and iBooks may very well have justification and hyphenation baked in as options and the decision not to leverage those features could be up to publishers at the level of the individual books, in which case my complaint is still valid, but should be leveled at publishers, not the platforms they publish on.)) or Bible apps like OliveTree BibleReader or Crossway’s ESV Bible.

For all this new-fangled technology we have, e-reading is just not like reading a real book. It seems to me justification and hyphenation are a cheap and easy way to get closer to the real thing, so why aren’t they being utilized more universally?

As should be patently obvious, this prediction is not based on any inside information.

I’ve read some rumors to the effect that the next iPhone will be half an inch wider and half an inch taller than iPhone 4. I’m trying to imagine how Apple could increase the size of the screen without compromising their much touted Retina display. Apple’s always bragged about iPhone 4’s display being greater than 300 dpi, which is supposedly some kind of sweet spot where the human eye can no longer perceive individual pixels. Setting aside the possible dubiousness of that claim, it’s inescapable that increasing the screen size by a half inch on each side without also increasing the resolution would decrease the dpi to around 280 (by my very rough calculations) and basically ruin their whole marketing shtick.

So here’s my totally half-baked prediction: iPhone 5 will have a 720p HD display in order to preserve the 300+ dpi on a larger display. I imagine this will ruffle the feathers of a few iPhone app developers who’ve had to work over the past year to redesign their apps for 960×640, since now they’ll have to turn around and redesign for 1080×720, but wouldn’t it be a fantastic blow to all the competing handset makers who seem to be standardizing around qHD?