Still, the headline used by Wired.com was clearly incorrect; Jobs wasn’t falsely advertising the iPhone’s capabilities at all. I’ll note that I like Wired magazine quite a bit, and what we have here is most likely just an overzealous editor. But a lot of people read the headlines and it taints their view; someone reading that article may be more likely to think Jobs, once again, has overblown a product to excite people. He didn’t.

Phil Plait is no stranger to this topic, “having spend a few years calibrating a camera on board Hubble.”

Hindsight being what it is, perhaps Apple could have phrases like “for many,” and “for some,” but I think John Gruber, who has held the new phone and seen the Retina Display in action, have the way of it in his response to Samsung’s criticism

They can say this now, but they won’t be able to say such things and be taken seriously after the iPhone 4 is released and people have seen it in person. Until they figure out a way to make AMOLED visible in daylight, they’re not even in the game.

If Jobs is wrong, or worse, lying, then one has to ask if scientific exactitude is required for every everything we say. If that’s the new canon, there are a lot of liars out there.

S