On the new iPad, running iPhone-only apps just got a lot better. Instead of using the old 320 × 480 resolution graphics like the previous iPads have, we now benefit from displaying the 640 × 960 Retina graphics from the iPhone 4 and up. While iPhone-only apps don’t look nearly as good as apps designed to work with the old iPads, let alone the new Retina display, there is a noticeable upgrade in quality.
Eli Hodapp over at Touch Arcade does note that owners of previous generation iPads can take advantage of Retina-enabled iPhone apps if they’re willing to jailbreak their device. Using RetinaPad, the Retina iPhone apps will probably look even better on the iPad 2 than the new iPad because the low resolution will blur the jaggies a bit.
While it is nice of Apple to include, it does have a downside. If developers think “Hey, it works well enough on the iPad,” they might not bother to make and distribute iPad-specific builds of their apps. That would be very bad. The differences in how we interact with an iPhone app versus an iPad app are vast. Don’t let the increased resolution fool you.
What do you think? Can you now bear to run those handful of iPhone-only apps you want? Let us know by leaving a comment underneath this post.
Via: Touch Arcade, Real Racing 2
