Dear mobile device reviewers - Plastic isn't cheap, you're just uninformed!

OK so a lot of so called professional tech journalists and a plethora of users are always saying stupid things about devices made of plastic. For example, the most common one I've heard recently was comparing the Samsung Galaxy Nexus to other devices like the iPhone and calling it "cheaply made of inferior materials".
Holy crap this is an ignorant statement. Let's get into why.
First, let's talk about the word "plastic". 
Here's the definition from Wikipedia.
Plastic - A plastic material is any of a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic organic solids that are moldable. Plastics are typically organic polymers of high molecular mass, but they often contain other substances. They are usually synthetic, most commonly derived from petrochemicals, but many are partially natural.[1]

Plastic is just a term that refers to a whole class of materials. It is equivalent to the term metal which also refers to a whole class of materials with widely different properties. Plastics are as widely varied as metals. To assume all plastic is "essentially the same" is equivalent to saying cast iron and titanium are "essentially the same". It's utterly ignorant of the facts.

For some reason, when many people hear the word "plastic" they think of cheap, low quality toys like those found in gumball machines and Cracker Jacks boxes. They don't seem to think of football helmets or bullet proof "glass" (which is actually a plastic).

This misconception seems to carry into those persons' views of consumer products and in particular mobile devices. This leads to incorrect and unfair perceptions of a device's build quality based on ignorance of materials. Let me illustrate. For the iPhone 5 Apple chose to use an aluminum body with anodized colouring. Reviewers gushed over the "quality materials" without taking a millisecond to think about it. Of course we know now that the anodizing is so delicate that many iPhone 5's come scratched out of the box from handling during manufacturing and shipping. 
Samsung, on the other hand, built the Galaxy Nexus out of PC/ABS which is an extremely durable, lightweight, and resilient material that is also transparent to radio waves. This was a brilliant choice of materials. It allows for a thin, lightweight device that can survive drops and bangs and bounce back without damage. The plastic body also helps absorb impact forces instead of passing the full G shock of a fall or bump to the electronic components. Where an aluminum device will dent from an impact, a plastic device will deform, absorb the shock, and bounce back into shape.

So next time you see that a device is made of plastic, think football helmets and bullet-proof glass and not cheap toys.  After all, would you rather play hockey wearing a plastic helmet, or an aluminum and glass helmet?

UPDATE - Here's a few links you might find intersting as it seems PhoneArena is coming around to the facts.

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Confirmed-the-Samsung-Galaxy-S-III-is-polycarbonate-not-plain-plastic_id30304
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Whats-in-a-touch-The-Samsung-Galaxy-S-III-polycarbonate-debate_id30406

The Tablet Apps Fallacy

With the release of the iPad Mini, Apple's marketing spin machine is back in action. One of their core talking points with their iPad line is how many "tablet apps" they have in their app market compared the competition. At this point they're touting 275,000 "tablet optimized" apps. Sounds pretty impressive doesn't it? I have to admit I used to think this was a real Apple advantage too until I thought about it and realized it's really all nonsense. Here's what Apple is really saying. "iOS and our iOS development tools are so poorly designed that developers have to create separate versions of their app which are optimized for each of our devices." You see, while Apple spouts on about how few tablet apps there are in the Android market while they have 275,000 in theirs, the real story is that Android doesn't require a separate, special tablet version of each app. The fact is that the Android OS and the developer kit allow a developer to create a single app that works on all or most devices. I don't mean just scaling up the same screens to a larger size, but actually providing a different interface based on the capabilities of the current device. Want proof? If you have both a Nexus 7 and a Galaxy Nexus* go look at any of the following apps on both devices and look at how the same app changes to accommodate the display of the device they are running on. Note that these are just a few to demonstrate what we're discussing. Not a comprehensive list of apps that take advantage of this.

• Gmail
• Evernote
• Google+
• Pulse

See the difference?

The reality is that with Android, developers can create one single app that runs on all devices and optimizes for the available display size and resolution. No "tablet optimized" apps are necessary. This means that basically Android tablets have access to all the apps in the Play market, not just select few. 

The only real exception to this is with games. In this case because we are talking about providing additional textures and maps etc. for different devices, app sizes become cumbersome so most game developers kindly provide HD versions of their games for tablet devices and phone users with HD screens that choose to run the HD version. But this is an issue of providing choice, not a limitation of the OS.

Caveats

I want to point this out before any Apple fanboi types say something.

Apps created for Android versions previous to Honeycomb / Ice Cream Sandwich will need to be updated by the developer to work on both tablets and phones smoothly. This is because tablet devices were not supported by Android or the Android dev kit in Gingerbread or earlier. All tablet devices previous to Honeycomb were unofficial and used hacked versions of Android created by the manufacturer of the device. Any fragmentation in this segment was not created by Google, but by third parties with unsupported devices with unofficial versions of Android. Also, Apple does provide some tools to assist developers with this, but it's much easier to do on Android as the system handles most of the work.

*I'm using the Nexus 7 and Galaxy Nexus in this example because they are both Pure Android devices and are not subject to any OEM changes to the OS that could break this feature of the Android OS.They also both will have the same version of the latest release of Android which will make such a comparison an apples to apples comparison.

What Apple didn't do with the new iPad.

With the new iPad released yesterday, Apple made some, mostly minor, hardware upgrades. However, it's more important to look at what they didn't do, but should have.


Improve the OS User Interface (UI)


This is the number one thing Apple should have focused on. From the beginning of their entry into the tablet market with the original iPad, Apple ignored the fact that a tablet is not a phone or media player. It is a completely different animal that has more in common with a laptop than a phone. A tablet is a device intended to bridge the gap between smart phones and desktop computers. iOS should have been modified to operate in that role. 
Apple essentially created a giant iPhone, did nothing to differentiate it or add value to the new form factor and has continued to ignore the opportunity to do so.
Comedy writers were all over this glaring screw up on Apple's part right from day one.
 Check it out.

Given the new iPad has even more pixels to play with, what was Apple thinking when they decided not to take any advantage of it whatsoever with the main user interface?


Let's compare.


First, here is an iPhone 4S home screen.

iPhone 4S

Now here's the iPad.

iPad

Amazing isn't it how Apple went all out making use of the extra screen space?


Now, Google on the other hand waited before releasing an official tablet version of Android until they had one that was optimized for the tablet form factor.
Take a look at the main desktop screen of my Asus Transformer which is running Android 4 (ICS).

Let me point out some of the differences.

First, notice that you can put many more items on the screen (if you wish). In the iPad, Apple kept the same icon columns as the iPhone, and just spaced them out further, leaving a lot of empty space. On Android the icon spacing remains normal and just fits more on the screen.

Next note the app drawers. There are six on the right side of the screen. These are totally user customizable. You create them, name them and decide what apps you want in them. As you can see, I've created categories of apps I commonly use and put my most used apps in those drawers.

Widgets. This is a key feature of Android over iOS. Widgets are live, active programs that run on the desktop. They can be interacted with, update themselves etc. On the screen above you can see a weather widget in the top left and a date widget in the bottom right. These are the most basic kinds of widgets. They just display information that is updated automatically. The YouTube widget is interactive. You can flick through the panels to see the latest videos in your subscription lists and tap to view any that interest you. In the middle of the screen you can see widgets that display information in a customizable way. You can choose what data and how they display  it. For example the middle of the three shows a graph of battery life and CPU use.

Note: I don't normally have the YouTube widget on the main screen, but I moved it there for this demo.

Overall, you have a much more pleasing, customizable and functional User Interface with Android on tablets. Apple hasn't bothered because they aren't user driven, they are driven to sell content. As long as they keep making money, they won't add anything that doesn't contribute to content sales.

Other things missing on the iPad

Still no USB or SD-Card slots!

 I'm not surprised. While this is a huge convenience for users, for Apple it's only a way for users to side-load content without using iTunes so they may never support it.

I'll add more as I have the time and inclination. 

Note: All linked media is from third party sources and copyright their respective owners.

New iPad screen, same old bad choices.

So the new iPad was announced yesterday. I'll post more about that later but for now I wanted to address the one thing that people will be making a big deal about. The new screen.


With the new iPad, Apple has finally improved on the iPad and iPad II's pitiful 1024x768 screen resolution. The new "Retina Display" has a resolution of 2048x1536. You should have noticed that this is an oddball resolution that really hasn't been used before. The reason is that Apple has essentially just doubled the vertical and horizontal resolution of the previous display in each direction. The obvious question is why didn't Apple just use a standard size like 1920x1080?
Well, I think there are two reasons. 


1. iOS
   The Operating System of the iPad and iPhone relies on a fixed screen aspect ration of 1.33 or 4:3 just like an old tube television. Because it wasn't originally designed to scale for other aspect ratios, straying from 4:3 screens would make the OS look pretty ugly as the icons and other user interface elements would become distorted (ie squeezed or stretched). Rather than fix iOS to properly and automatically handle scaling to various aspect ratios, Apple instead sticks to 4:3 screens. This allows them to cheat and simply "blow up" existing apps and UI elements to fit new screens.


2. Marketing
    Apple loves marketing smoke and mirrors. Heck the company is built on it. In this case, while competitors choose more useful and more sensible screen resolutions, they can claim a false advantage with the old "Ours is bigger" argument.  So while the competition moves to more sensible and more functional 16:9 format screens (1920x1080 and 1280x720), Apple will confuse the issue simply by using the specious argument that "bigger is better".


So why isn't Apple's screen choice better?


Well, mainly it's this matter of aspect ratios. Apple's main focus is delivering multimedia content. These days that means High Def. After all, you aren't still watching a tube TV are you? And even if you are, you're wasting most of the screen with black bars to fit the wide screen content onto it, or worse, you're chopping of the sides of the picture to make it fit. Yet that's exactly what Apple gives customers with all the iPads. A tube TV 4:3 experience.


Here's a diagram to help explain what I mean.

• Cyan area (I) - The new iPad screen's 2048x1536 screen with it's 4:3 aspect
• Black area (II) - Area III scaled to the full width of the iPad screen
• Gray area (III) - A proper HD screen at 1920x1080
• Reddish area (IV) - Common anamorphic movie ratio screen (2.39:1)

As you can see for viewing HD content, the iPad screen is a terrible waste of screen real estate that doesn't work well for the now almost universal HD content. Even worse, viewing high quality cinematic content (reddish area) will leave almost half the total screen space (1.54 million pixels out of 3.1 million ) of the iPad wasted as unused black bars. 

Conclusion

Apple's new iPad screen resolution was mostly chosen for them by their previous poor design choices. Choices that were made long ago during their original tablet product development. This is something they should have fixed in iOS before they started making tablets. Instead they have forced themselves and their users to live with their mistake. Now iPad users pay for Apple's mistake by being forced to live with a tube TV style screen in an HD world. This is unforgivable for a company who's business model is content delivery.

By comparison, watching the same HD content on a device like the Asus Transformer 700T (or actually most any current Android tablet) will  actually give you a better viewing experience as HD content will fill more of the screen space without requiring the scaling that reduces quality and performance.

Overall, the new screen resolution adds little to the appeal of the iPad as a multimedia device. It's only impressive when compared to the fact that the previous iPad's had embarrassingly poor screen resolutions for a tablet format device.