Thanks John and Ellis for the links. A few thoughts:
- Datacolor making its app to go with their Spyder colorimeter free is a good approach, and its existence also suggests that some serious photographic support and usage of the iPad is developing.
- Apple should update iTunes and such to convert to 2048x1536 in downloads, to make side-by-side comparisons better marketing tools for the new iPad. A lot of other common photo uploading systems (WordPress as well as Facebook) forcibly down-sample, and when they do, always to less than 2048x1536, so I hope that Apple's clout in mobile motivates new "retina resolution" uploading options. Even on my inadequate old iPad with its antiquated "quarter Retina resolution", it is nice to be able to zoom into and pan around an image, so I would be happy with 2048x1536 images.
- I rather suspect that there will be at least a long pause in mobile device resolution in the range 1920x1080 to 2048x1536, in large part because I expect it will be a long time before much online video goes beyond those limits. Also, David Tobie is probably right that on mobile screen sizes, the step up from 1024x768 is already a rather slight benefit for most people's photo viewing habits, and if so, will be if anything even less significant to mobile movie viewing. That leaves "even sharper text display" as the main benefit from going further, and that is hardly a big marketing point.