does apple's new phone have us going crazy?

by kirk r gray

september 9, 2014, tim cook and friends showed off some shiny new well designed gadgets that have people drooling over and the lines have already started. but what's the impact for email marketers?

first and foremost, i'd like to be one of the first to say to apple welcome to the world of multiple screen sizes and as others have pointed out 2012. for what it's worth, i'm a mac, ipad, android phone user and love the look of apple devices, but really like blinkfeed so that's why i use an htc one...so i'm not bashing them, just welcoming them to the game. that aside what does the iphone 6 and 6+ mean to us as professional email marketers? not a lot really.

currently, our best practices say to make emails no wider than 640 pixels wide, because they scale down at a rate of 2:1. still good practice. one thing the iphone does exceptionally well is support email in its native app, people are used to that, and it was the biggest complaint that I had when I switched to android, but i will say this having an android phone has made me a better coder, it's made me make my emails look good on android and by default good on iphone.

here is where it gets tricky though, adaptive design. adaptive designs are powered by media queries, and when we do them most email coders have been using a screen width of 320 pixels. these two new devices are reporting 360 and 375 pixels, so that's two new media queries or at least edits to your templates to incorporate a range (320 - 375 pixels). 640 to 320 was easy, content and columns shifted nicely, now we have to do more math.

does this mean as apple inflates the screen size we'll inflate the width of our emails to a max width of 750 pixels? since no one has one of these devices in hand, we don't know yet.