According to Apple, the iPhone 4 has a new and better screen resolution:
3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen Multi-Touch display
960-by-640-pixel resolution at 326 ppi
This little detail affects our apps in a heavy way. Most of the demo apps on the net have one thing in common: They position views in the believe that the screen has a fixed size of 320 x 480 pixels. So what most (if not all) developers do is: they designed everything in such a way, that a touchable area is (for example) 50 x 50 pixels big. Just enough to tap it. Things have been positioned relative to the upper left, to reach a specific position on screen - let's say the center, or somewhere at the bottom.
When we develop high-resolution apps, they probably won't work on older devices. And if they do, they would suffer a lot from 4-times the size of any image, having to scale them down in memory.
According to Supporting High-Resolution Screens In Views, from the Apple docs:
On devices with high-resolution screens, the
imageNamed:,imageWithContentsOfFile:, andinitWithContentsOfFile:methods automatically looks for a version of the requested image with the@2xmodifier in its name. It if finds one, it loads that image instead. If you do not provide a high-resolution version of a given image, the image object still loads a standard-resolution image (if one exists) and scales it during drawing.When it loads an image, a UIImage object automatically sets the size and scale properties to appropriate values based on the suffix of the image file. For standard resolution images, it sets the scale property to 1.0 and sets the size of the image to the image’s pixel dimensions. For images with the @2x suffix in the filename, it sets the scale property to 2.0 and halves the width and height values to compensate for the scale factor. These halved values correlate correctly to the point-based dimensions you need to use in the logical coordinate space to render the image.