Samsung, LG working on 1080p smartphones

If you were wondering what the big names in tech have lined up for next year's phones, it would seem that 1080p screens definitely factor in to the planning.

The latest internet scuttlebutt has both Samsung and LG gearing up to launch handheld products with 1080p-resolution displays. Samsung will probably put a screen of this quality into its Galaxy S successor, while benchmarking data shows that LG is working on a phone with the codename F240.

Of course, both companies are already late to the party, with HTC recently releasing the 1080p-packing Butterfly J in Japan. It also has an international variant rumoured to be en route to the US — known there as the Droid DNA, and everywhere else as the HTC Deluxe.

The GL Benchmarking app also reports that the LG F240 includes a processor with a 1.5GHz clock speed. The gamblers here at CNET Australia are placing money on this pointing to LG again relying on the quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset to power this model, as it did with the Nexus 4 and Optimus G units.

Samsung's efforts are probably geared toward a Galaxy S4 device, which some pundits are expecting to see as early as February next year at the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) exhibition in Barcelona.

This all begs the question of whether this is a great leap forward for phones, or pixels for pixels' sake. 1920x1080 pixels over a 5-inch display works out to be about 440 pixels per inch (ppi), or far more than a human eye can perceive, as we understand it. The same has been asked about the Google Nexus 10 tablet, with its 299ppi, and this is a significantly lower resolution that what we are talking about with 1080p phones.