>> As usual with almost every
>> product though, the technology will work its way down to the cheaper
>> handsets over the next few years.
>
> So the answer is "because it's new"?

There's nothing fundamentally new about it, nor is it any particular 
step increase, Apple just made a big song and dance about it 
(particularly as they claim OLED was not capable of such high ppi) and 
it happens to be the highest ppi phone display on the market IIRC.  I'm 
sure you can find almost all values of ppi from 100 up to 300 on the 
market if you look.

> Remember? I *own* one of those phones! A little Nokia 3310. (I don't
> *use* it any more, of course...)

I have a 3330 at home too (I did have a 3310 but it had an accident with 
a river and then with a screwdriver and a soldering iron).

>> It's unusual to find even cheap monitors now that don't do proper 24bit.
>
> Um... is that the way round you meant to say it?

I think so :-)  I just got one of the cheapest off Amazon for my mother 
and it claims to do full 24-bit colour (16.7m colours, no dithering) - I 
didn't check though.

> And here I was thinking it's because a liquid crystal's voltage response
> is highly non-linear and it's hard to get the really small colour
> graduations required...

It's not hard, you just need more bits for the DAC, and that takes up 
valuable space on the glass (don't forget each DAC needs to be the width 
of 1 sub-pixel!).  Most "24-bit" panels will have a 10-bit DAC for each 
sub-pixel, the 8-bit input is used to look up a 10-bit value in a LUT, 
then the 10-bit value is used to generate the correct voltage.  The LUT 
factors in gamma and the non-linear LC response curve.

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