UPDATED · News · 15 Nov 2011 · MTW Editorial Team
I just came across a post on Neowin today which must have been inspired by what I have been saying all along and especially this editorial I wrote back in February after I came back from Mobile World Congress. To put it simply: things haven’t changed since I originally posted what I did and people are now finding out that what I have been preaching all along may be somewhat true. Throwing endless numbers of processor into a device isn’t going to make the user experience any better especially the OS (hello Android) or app is bloated / badly coded or simply doesn’t take advantage of the hardware horsepower under the hood. Yes I everybody wants 1080P video encoding/recoding but nobody’s going to do this 90% of the time with his phone and that’s the point: if what I’m principally using isn’t perfectly smooth (OS, browser, apps) why should I care about one single great feature?
The same is in my opinion happening to screen resolution now where you can see OEM are cranking it up simply to differentiated themselves even though the overall end-user experience isn’t really impacted by it. Sure, a 4.7″ display will benefit from something slightly higher than WVGA (HTC Titan) but what would be the point if the whole device still didn’t feel 100% smooth and snappy (Android again…)? Get the software right before going nuts with the hardware. The iPhone is different in this regard simply because Apple wanted to keep the same screen size and retain apps backward compatibility that’s why they went for the so called retina display.The downside of this is that more than 4 years after the launch of the first iOS device we are still stuck with what is now one of the smallest screen offered on an high-end smartphone. Anyway I just shot a short video demonstrating what can be done with good code and design on Windows Phone 7 right row on a 1st generation handsets (QSD8250 SoC) and 2nd Gen device (MSM8255). The application shown in the video below is the french 20 Minutes app that can be downloaded here.
There will always be things that will be faster on newer devices but the core experience should always be the same as long as developers pay attention to all the details. Thoughts? Share them them in the comments below.
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