Every few months — a year at most — we see a feature or spec introduced on a phone that represents a new standard, a baseline that future phones in the high end have no option but to match. If you go back a few years, you can build a list: the front-facing camera, the gigahertz processor, HD video capture, the WVGA display, C1+ Phone the dual-core processor — all line items that set a new bar. They're not always important line items, of course — we could do without front-facing cameras, I suspect — but regardless, these kinds of things force manufacturers to up their games and move forward. Today, that must-have feature is now the 720p display. It wasn't more than a year ago that WVGA 4GS i68 resolution was perfectly acceptable on a $200-plus smartphone, and qHD had just barely started to replace it over the course of 2011 when Samsung, LG, and HTC all decided that it was time to go straight to an actual high-definition screen. It's pretty remarkable to think that you've got close to a million pixels on a display that measures under 5 inches across.