When Steve Jobs whipped out the iPad, the first thing I did was do a double-take on the screen’s 4:3 aspect ratio. At 1024×763 it’s what I used to have on my 2005 Windows XP CRT screen. It’s wide. It’s iPod “phatty” nano G3 [Wikipedia link] wide and that design only lasted 1 generation before Apple back-peddled to the long and slim. Apple used to default to 16:10, and the new iMac is 16:9, which is modern HDTV aspect ratio. (The iPhone and iPod touch are 3×2)

At 4×3 the iPad will require the same monstrous letterboxing on videos that old SD TVs required. (TUAW has a great post up on this). So what’s the deal?

First, unlike a TV where you sit across the room and the screen fills a relatively small part of your field of vision, like the iPhone, the iPad will be held much closer. Even with monstrous letterboxing, the video will still fill a large part of your field of vision.

Of course, the iPad isn’t only a video player. There are other forms of content to consume. For web browsing, even 16:10 sometimes feels too “short”, and you need to scroll more than you like. For books, a narrow page may not be ideal, and with a two-page spread, those pages will seem squat, squarish.

Now don’t get us wrong, if Apple added pixels and made it 16:10 (1280×800), TiPb wouldn’t complain (they could pillarbox the books!). If they took pixels away to make it 16:9 (1024×576), it might lose part of that “big screen iPod touch” infamy. And it might lose functionality for anything other than video.

It’s definitely a compromise, but is it a good one?

[Thanks Antony for bringing the counter-argument to our attention!]

We get leaked third generation iPhone pictures. Not all of them are compelling enough to post or link to, but every once and a while, something comes in that fires off the old brainstorms. See above.

This one was sent to us by Emanuel who said simply, “Hello, this is leaked Photo of the iPhone video coming out June 9.”

Date aside — how tall is that screen now? Quite a bit taller than the current iPhones and iPods touch. We’ve heard rumors of a repositioned ear piece before, and this could certainly be a reason for it.

Not only is it taller, however, it’s also exactly 16×9, that magical widescreen video ration the current iPhone achieves by letter-boxing, and what the Zune HD will have by going with a slimmer 272×480 display.

Apple can’t cut pixels — it would play havoc with all those 40,000ish apps that count on every single one of the current 320×480. Assuming Apple adds to them then, we’ll be looking at 320×570.

Adding pixels wouldn’t create the same problem for developers, since current apps would still fit on the wider screen. However, instead of having to letter-box video as much (some video is even wider than 16×9), Apple would suddenly be letter-boxing (or pillar-boxing) everything else. That doesn’t sound like Apple.

We’ll speculate after the break!

Enter our noble editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn: “Hey, what if they just left the dock visible for everything but video. That would make app switching a lot faster.”

Doing the math, the current iPhone dock is 90 pixels high. 480 (old screen height) + 90 (dock height) = 570, which looks to fit nicely into 16×9.

Sure, landscape mode would require a dock that re-stacked vertically during transition. The current dock would likely also cause some problems for some users in an always-on implementation, coming too close to the menu tabs many apps use at the bottom of the current iPhone screen, and making the overall look a tad busy and cluttered.

The ability to auto-hide the dock like in Mac OS X (where you see pillar-boxes of black until you touch the area) could solve that. So could a whole new dock or approach to the home screen in general, which Daring Fireball’s John Gruber had on his wish-list going back to Macworld 2009 in January.

So, let’s break this back down. The picture above claims to be a leak of the iPhone video, available January 9. It has a 16×9 screen ratio. Do you think a) the picture could be real, b) the release date of June 9 could be real (it’s been rumored already), c) Apple could go with an even wider, wide screen iPod, and d) if they do, how will they handle it for existing applications?

We have roughly 48hrs to figure it out for ourselves before Phil Schiller takes the keynote stage at WWDC and — hopefully — tells us for sure.