Question

Hey guys, here’s a weird question. I’m doing device detection and I noticed that the iphone 4 reports the same resolution as the iphone 3g(s): 320×480.

shouldn’t this be higher? or did I miss something?

Answer 1

Points Versus Pixels is a good read in this regard:

In iOS there is a distinction between the coordinates you specify in
your drawing code and the pixels of the underlying device. When using
native drawing technologies such as Quartz, UIKit, and Core Animation,
you specify coordinate values using a logical coordinate space, which
measures distances in points. This logical coordinate system is
decoupled from the device coordinate space used by the system
frameworks to manage the pixels on the screen. The system
automatically maps points in the logical coordinate space to pixels in
the device coordinate space, but this mapping is not always
one-to-one. This behavior leads to an important fact that you should
always remember:

One point does not necessarily correspond to one pixel on the screen.