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Originally Posted by afv011
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There's a very interesting reply by Dianne Hackborn, a Google engineer, in the comments to that Forbes article. I can't seem to link straight to her comment, and I think the whole thing's worth reading rather than selectively quoting, so apologies for a lengthy post here.
Obviously she's defending the Nexus 7 (following its portrayal as flawed in the iPad mini launch), but in doing so it gives us more food for thought in what works at various screen sizes:
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It is certainly true that the resolution and screen size they picked for this device [the iPad mini] is largely being driven by constraints based on their legacy of current products and applications. I don’t think it is right to talk about this as an issue of apps “optimized for Retina,” but rather their core model of having very fixed resolutions and fixed 2x scaling for higher density. (The same reason why for the iPhone 5 they ended up with existing applications stuck with black bars on the edges until developers explicitly update their applications to know about this new screen size.)
So their choice here is really either: (1) keep the existing iPad screen resolution and aspect ratio (at the original iPad resolution or the retina 2x resolution), shrinking the size down as much as possible without impacting usability too much (because the entire UI becomes smaller and thus harder to touch with a finger); or (2) introduce a new class of screen for iOS apps and reset to an app store for this device that initially only has phone apps in it until developers update their apps to handle the new screen.
What they did is probably the best decision given their constraints.
However, if you are going to talk about them in terms of the competition, these constraints do not excuse them for the situation. The fact is that Android has more flexibility in how it deals with screens, so when something like the Nexus 7 is designed there are fewer constraints in what can be done and the device can more closely match what product designers consider optimal for the device. This applies to both size and pixel density: Android applications are designed to adjust to variations in screen size, so a smaller screen or wider aspect ratio can be selected and the applications will generally adjust to it, and this allowed the choice of a smaller more portable device size for the Nexus 7; in addition, Android doesn’t impose a strict 2x scaling when picking pixel densities, so the Nexus 7 could pick a more optimal screen density for the current technology, which is not quite up to Apple’s classification of “Retina on a tablet,” but much closer to that than to the density of the iPad Mini and a better trade-off for cost and power use than Apple could make.
So, yes, every device represents a point in time and will be eclipsed by devices in the future. But the fact is that Apple has built a fairly inflexible UI architecture, which has forced them to pick device characteristics that are not as good as the ones that people can pick with Android’s more flexible approach. If Apple is going to get to beat on Android for its variety of device configurations and such, we should also get to acknowledge the benefits that Android’s approach brings over iOS.
Along those lines, it is interesting to note that in all of their beating up of the Nexus 7 and “tablet optimized” applications (as well as other screen content comparisons), they did everything in landscape orientation. Why do you think this is? The Nexus 7 is pretty clearly designed to be used as a portrait device for most things besides watching videos and playing games; my impression is that the iPad also tends towards portrait as its dominant orientation (unlike Android 10″ tablets that tend to be oriented around landscape use).
So why show everything in landscape? This actually biases things quite a bit against the Nexus 7. When we designed the Nexus 7, we actually didn’t just shrink down a 10″ tablet. Ironically, Apple made a big point of their iPad Mini not being just a shrunk down iPad, but that is exactly what it is! Because we had more flexibility with Android, we got to look at what we thought was an optimal screen size, which is smaller than what Apple could do without creating a whole new class of iOS applications. One of the impacts of this is that, on 7″ screens, portrait orientation apps often work better as a single pane layout (more like a phone) than a tablet style two pane layout.
If you go through the standard applications that ship on a Nexus 7, in portrait orientation they not infrequently use a more phone style UI rather than tablet UI — this includes the YouTube app, Play Store, Settings, etc. This isn’t because they aren’t tablet apps; all of these applications have full 10″ tablet UIs that have already shipped on previous devices. It is just that for them the 10″ tablet UI doesn’t work as well on a 7″ screen. Applications may also switch to a tablet style UI in landscape, but this is not as important since they will more often be used in portrait. Or many will have a more compact two pane layout on the smaller 7″ screen — for example GMail and GTalk do this. The iPad Mini does none of this, it just takes all of the existing iPad tablet UIs and shrinks them down with the result of smaller touch targets and smaller text to read instead of adjusting the content shown. That complete focus on landscape layouts is tremendously misleading about the actual experience on these devices, and again is glossing over one of the real benefits that Android as a platform has over iOS.
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