The Vivo Xplay 3S shows us exactly how sharp a 1440x2560 resolution is

A sort of a fixation on display resolution has taken a grip of the smartphone world, and it won't loosen for the life of it (or us). Whereas until recently 1080x1920, or full HD screens, were the very best you can expect from a smartphone, manufacturers such as LG Display and Japan Display are pushing the boundaries further still, leading to a few rather natural questions.

The very first one of those is simply curiosity – how sharp a 1440x2560 display really is? Well, an internal slide from a Chinese Vivo presentation has now answered that question, as it shows the 5.7-inch 515ppi Xplay 3S, the company's upcoming new flagship. It shouldn't surprise you that a Chinese handset maker could eventually snatch the title for the first 1440p smartphone, seeing as it's BBK that is behind Vivo, the same company that operates the Oppo brand. Anyway, as you can see, zoomed in like this, the difference is undeniable and quite perceptible, especially if you compare it to the 'lowly' 326 pixels per inch the iPhones boast.

Which gets us to the second most common question – do we really need it? A strong case can be made about even the impossibility of discerning much of a difference between a 720p and a 1080p screen, though a trained eye will definitely spot the improvements. But a jump to 1440p, now that just feels redundant, and hopefully this statement won't look like one of those panic articles from two years ago, that had bloggers fret over how ridiculously big a 4.5-inch screen is. But quite frankly, we can only really justify a 1440p screen on a big-screened phablet, where the size of the diagonal is at the cost of image clarity.

Regardless, whether a 1440p display makes sense or not isn't really a concern for most manufacturers, as drumming up successive generations of smartphone lines is getting increasingly difficult, as most bases have been covered already (at this point in time, that is). This means that we'll be seeing this fledgling trend take off, likely by the end of 2014.