New iPhone to feature 4.6-inch display

Apple’s new iPhone will have a larger 4.6-inch Retina display and launch in the second quarter of 2012, according to the South Korean media.

Citing an unnamed industry source, the Maeil Business Newspaper(via Reuters) said that Apple has decided to drastically increase the screen real estate on its next-generation smartphone, expected to be called the “new iPhone”.

The paper’s sources have disclosed that Apple will include a 4.6-inch display in the new iPhone, and said that the firm has already started to place orders with screen suppliers.

A screen at that size would be a considerable increase on the 3.5-inch display in current model, the iPhone 4S, which was launched last year as an upgrade on 2010’s iPhone 4.

Apple’s major display suppliers, LG Display and Samsung, declined to comment on the report.

The iPhone is arguably the key product in Apple’s lineup, accounting for around half of the California company’s sales.

But Apple temporarily lost its spot last year as the world’s number one smartphone maker to Samsung Electronics, which has sold more than 20 million units of its Galaxy S2 smartphone, which features a 4.6-inch OLED display.

Samsung is widely expected to soon introduce the Galaxy S3 phone, potentially coming with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, a 4.8-inch 1080p high-definition edge-to-edge display and a 1.5GHz quad-core Samsung Exynos processor.

The S3 is likely to be a key competitor to the new iPhone, and so Apple could look to make a big splash against its rival by introducing a display with a higher pixel resolution, as it recently did with the new iPad.

Previous sources have suggested the new iPhone will have a ‘tear drop’ form factor to accommodate the larger screen, and come with the A5X processor that features in the new iPad. It is also expected to support 4G connectivity.

Apple is expected to announce the new iPhone at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in early June in San Francisco, and then put the handset on sale shortly after.

It is likely that it will be accompanied by iOS 6, the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system, which may introduce Apple’s rumoured iMaps system instead of Google Maps.