A report recently surfaced about iPhone 3G S being capable of playing 1080p. At first, I thought, ?Well, so what? How much could one expect of a 3-inch screen anyway??

But then, blam-o ? it hit me. Imagine an accessory some day in the future that could play those luscious vids on an HDTV. That would be sweet. And given accessory makers? access to the SDK, maybe it's not that far away from reality. But that's just speculation. Here's what we actually know so far:

A forum poster named fridtear at Chinese site WEiPHONE.com vouched for the iPhone 3GS? ability to play 1080p using the built-in video player. He ran vids at 1920x1080 resolution and 30 Mbps with the help of FileAid, a freebie document storage and viewing app.

Engadget Mobile tried to duplicate the procedure and recorded their experiment (below).

The guys tried out Apple's Quicktime HD trailers, a few homemade vids shot with a Lumix DMC-GH1 and some other miscellaneous files. It was somewhat successful, but not perfect. The homemade vids (at 720p) stuttered and loading the movie trailer was tough; it kept crashing the phone.

Now this is interesting, considering the official specs for the iPhone3GS outline a playback max of 640x480 res. So I guess it surprised noone that it was buggy and crashed fairly enough. But it did play, whichis key. So a lot of people think it's an issue with the code, not ahardware limitation. According to The Apps Machine,Apple followed its penchant for blocking unintended features and locked1080 HD playback. But considering the iTunes Store's HD video rentalsservice launched in March, chances are 50/50 that they might work on itto release it as a future function. Stay tuned.

[WEiPhone.com via Engadget Mobile, iLounge, The Apps Machine]