Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
It won't be phone apps running on the iPad mini, but iPad apps.
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I bit my tongue when you alleged this in an earlier post, but let's lay this to rest: there are plenty of tablet-optimised apps for Android. I agree that the iPad ones generally have the edge in elegance but it's ridiculous to suggest that Android tablet owners have to put up almost entirely with phone apps.
Much of the elegance on the iPad comes from having a specific target resolution to aim at. On Android some elegance is lost at the price of flexibility - for example we use tablet apps that adjust perfectly whether run on my wife's 16:10 Galaxy Tab running ICS or my 4:3 Touchpad running CM9.
What's more, when there is no tablet UI built into the app the 'phone' version is usually rendered afresh at the larger resolution - not pixel doubled (there are some exceptions where the app is written poorly using a bitmap for a screen background).
There are even some apps that have excellent full tablet versions on Android where the iOS users are still screaming that they only have a phone version (Rhapsody/Napster).
What's more, I posted elsewhere a good comment from Forbes by one of the Google engineers pointing out that it's precisely because the Android framework can adapt to a broad range of resolutions and pixel densities that the experience can be tailored, and Google and others have done this for the Nexus 7.
On a 7" device, designed to be held in portrait, it's actually more the single panel, 'phone'-style view that is easier to use - switching to a tablet multi-panel view in landscape.
Your tablet iPad apps may well be just as usable on a screen three-quarters of the size to the one they were designed for, but it's not as certainly true as you're making out.
Graham