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.