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Ars Dissects Android's Problems With Big Screens -- Including In Lollipop
When it comes to tablets, Google
doesn't even follow its own design guidelines." That's the upshot of Ars Technica writer Andew Cunningham's detailed, illustrated look at how Android handles screens much larger than seven inches, going back to the first large Android tablets a few years ago, but including Android 5.0 (Lollipop) on the Nexus 10 and similar sized devices. Cunningham is unimpressed with the use of space for both practical and aesthetic reasons, and says that problems crop up areas that are purely under Google's control, like control panels and default apps, as well as (more understandably) in third party apps.
The Nexus 10 took 10-inch tablets back to the "blown-up phone" version of the UI, where buttons and other UI stuff was all put in the center of the screen. This makes using a 10-inch tablet the same as using a 7-inch tablet or a phone, which is good for consistency, but in retrospect it was a big step backward for widescreen tablets. The old interface put everything at the edges of the screen where your thumbs could easily reach them. The new one often requires the pointer finger of one of your hands or some serious thumb-stretching. ... If anything, Lollipop takes another step backward here. You used to be able to swipe down on the left side of the screen to see your notifications and the right side of the screen to see the Quick Settings, and now those two menus have been unified and placed right in the center of the screen. The Nexus 10 is the most comfortable to use if it's lying flat on a table or stand and Lollipop does nothing to help you out there.
This article relates to something I've been bitching about since the earliest days of tablets: The insistence by Google and many app developers on treating a tablet like a giant phone instead of like a keyboard- and mouse-less computer. Crappy file managers and task management, lousy use of screen space, etc. all add up to an Android tablet being little more than an electronic teat you can use to get content fed into your eyeballs and ears and not something you can do real work (i.e. content creation) with.
Google had a chance with Android to remake the landscape of computing, to turn tablets into genuine alternatives to laptops for many (but certainly not all) users. Instead, they screwed it up (similar to how they failed to challenge MS Office with their own office apps). Are they this incompetent? Are they so focused on making money from content delivery that they can't see the bigger picture? Or do they have an (ahem) incentive not to compete in a bare-knuckles way with MS...?
On tablets, the only thing that makes Android better than Windows 8 is the sheer number of apps. Other than that, the actual OS itself is worse in just about every way I can think of. First on large tablets, it's nice to be able to show multiple apps at the same time, and vanilla Android can't do this. It's also nice to be able to map network drives and have all the apps be able to read from them. Android can't do this. Android doesn't come with a command line. Windows has 2. And that's just things that Windows 8 RT does that Android doesn't. Once you get into Windows x86, and the huge list of actual Windows applications it supports, there's no comparison between the two. Android works great on phones, but on tablets it's way too limited, and I'd much rather ne running Windows 8 over Android or iOS.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Google only cares about collecting data.
They care about staying in business.
Google bought Android because Microsoft had vowed to"f***ing kill Google", and Apple's direction with iGadgets were an existential threat to their business. If they hadn't stepped in with an alternative platform, they could have been a search engine without a platform to run on.
Make no mistake, without Android, Google would have been at Microsoft's mercy, and we all know the quality of that strained commodity.
It is pointing out ways the continuing trend of putting the I before U in UI is harming the UX. There are too many 'artists' or stupid people working in UI. Whatever happened to real UI principles? I wasn't around in the early days of computing. Were the UIs so annoying back then too? At least that era seemed to have lots dedicated UI research into making things better compared to making things simple. Simple isn't always better!
In short, computers were too rare and expensive to be play toys. They were designed to be professional's tools for work and study and the occasional nerd taking an interest in tinkering with them and large enough you expected people working at a desk. You expected a certain learning curve and the UI was designed to bring you up to a professional level. Here in Norway today the majority of 9 year olds have a smart phone and a tablet. In fact tablets have gotten a serious market share among children that haven't even started school yet because of the touch interface. It might be a simple interface, but they have years of experience using it and getting used to the quirks and honestly outside of button mashers and FPS games it's not really my mad keyboard and mouse skillz slowing me down. The important part is still knowing how to use it.
Professional tools haven't really changed much, if you want to run Photoshop or Maya they'll still give you an overwhelming amount of options and they expect that if you spend that kind of money you'll also invest the time to use it well. The difference is that you have a whole different and huge class of users that aren't really looking for much bigger complexity than Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That is the mass market and that is where most are looking to make money. If you're selling $1-5 apps then that's also reflected in the time people are willing to spend learning it, if they haven't gotten the hang of it in less than ten minutes - sometimes I'd give them two - I expect you've lost 90% of your audience. What's at the top of the learning curve doesn't matter if people drop out before they ever get there.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Most people who think this forget about margins and compare to the entire page size. 4:3 is actually the worst aspect ratio. The aspect ratio of a tablet only refers to the screen size. Your tablet already has bezels which act an awful lot like margins. Why do you want to waste valuable screen space on displaying blank margins?
.75" and .875" on the sides (larger margin for the center gutter), .75" and .5" for the top and bottom (larger margin for the page number). That leaves a printed area of 4.375" x 7.75", which is a 1.77 aspect ratio. Almost exactly 16:9 (1.78). If you go with smaller .5" and .75" margins on the sides, .5" and .5" margins on top and bottom, you get a 1.68 aspect ratio - between 16:10 and 16:9.
A trade paperback is typically 6"x9". Margins are asymmetrical, typically
For a regular paperback that's 5"x8", these margins give a 2.0 and 1.87 aspect ratio respectively. For a pocket paperback (4.18"x6.88"), the aspect ratios are 2.2 and 2.0. So for something the size of a phablet or 7" tablet, 16:9 is pretty close to ideal.
"But what about 10" tablets?" The printed area of an A4-sized sheet of paper with 25 cm margins is 1.54:1. Right in between 3:2 and 16:10. A letter-sized sheet of paper with 1 inch margins is 1.38, right between 3:2 and 4:3. However, if you look at anything published on A4-sized or letter-sized paper, the text is nearly always arranged in two columns. So 4:3 and even 3:2 is really too wide for displaying scrollable text. That's why nearly all websites have switched to a format with menus on the left, a narrow column of text, and misc links on the right. The main reason a "page" is this wide is so you can include wider pictures which span both columns. This becomes unnecessary when you can zoom into the picture like on a tablet, or rotate it to landscape mode and have the picture automatically flip to fill the longer width of the screen.
(Also note that the printed area of A4 and letter size paper is actually between 11"-13". Tablets are only 10" because of cost and weight. Assuming the publishing industry knew what they were doing if after centuries of printing they standardized on A4 and letter sizes, 10" tablets are eventually going to be phased out for 11", 12", and even 13" models as technology improves and they become lighter and cheaper.)