A foot is awfully close, but again, I'm over forty, so maybe you insane youths do hold it closer than that
. I believe Nintendo's published viewing distance is 16 inches, but I can't find that now.
I think the point stands - a 1080p screen
is an upgrade, and a nice one to have. Speaking personally, when someone shows me a 1080p and a 720p image side by side, scaled to sub 7 inches, I have to get something like 6 inches from the screen to see a perceptible difference - to close to be able to see the whole image at once. I've not done extensive testing with video in motion however, but I suspect Nintendo would prefer to prioritize a 60fps experience over a 30fps experience, as well as battery life
It's all a matter of tradeoffs, and 1080p isn't a slam dunk win for either the user experience or Nintendo's priorities.
Trade secrets are theft, both legally and common sensically. As is identity theft, which is what occurred in the wake of Lapsus$ dropping all those social security numbers, though in that case the victim wasn't Nintendo but random employees.
dont have 20/20 but am sslightly shortsighted (1.5), and i holf the switch, depending on my position around 1 feet.
to get con´crete:
when im leaning in my chair, having my hands on the handrests and holding my hands in a 120° angle im having pretty much a foot. sometimes (text small, immersed) i have it more like 90° and i get to ...say 25cm away from my eyes. (rouch measurements with a ruler in a hand).
i more then clearly see steps in text, static images, clean artstyles with a lot of flat shading and hard edges. Its not bad. but i see it. i also see the black lines between the pixels, in my opinion they are hard to ignore coming from any other screen for the first moments. (im not shure if its called screen door effect outside of vr)
im 170, average height, average arm length. maybe some play with their hands stretched out, but i usually rest my hands on something. 16 inch sounds reasonable to me, that would be me in my more far out position when im relaxed and the game doesn't have a small ui (Say mario or kirby, instead of fire emblem oder octopath travler).
The average height is 159.5 cm (5 ft 2.8 in) and the average height of a man is 171 cm (5 ft 7.3 in) for women, so 165.25cm.
holding it further away would mean im holding my arms up stretched out without having my elbows resting somewhere, that sounds rather uncomfortable for more then a minute or two.
but i had this conversation a few times on the old board, and people meant that im holding it unhealthily close and that 2 feet is more like it...
the average arm is 25 inches (random internet source, no idea how accurate). mines 25.59 (roughly measured)...holding it 2 feet would mean im literally holding my hands straight out. honestly, that would not be extremely uncomfortable and i have never seen someone play there handheld that way.
300 dpi is used in print for pictures viewed 2 feet or under. switch (regular) has
236.87 PPI, the oled has 209.8 PPI.
just by statistics the case is pretty set. (im sorry that i get so extensive, but it was rather annoying to argue that not everybody is 2 meters or has bad eye sight and that a increase in resolution from 720p would definitely look better for at least half of the User Base)
(and im not implying you are one of those, im just adding all that information if somebody starts to argue again that 1 feet it way to close ignoring that people have different physiology and not everybody is 2m high...)
essentially: 1080 would be the endgame for 7", going past that only makes sense for VR, but for specific genres (jrpgs, visual novels, adventure games,...) a higher resolution would benefit more then for others (fast paced, action games, or games with big elements and less ui text).
oh, also: pokemon. some of those suckers where really small and hard to see on the small screen if i hold it far from my face.
a higher resolution would not have helped, since the game was struggling to hold 720 as is, and a stable framerate would have also helped to make the game readable. but that is one case where i just had to hold it somewhat closer at moments to see whats happening in the grass further away or under me.