The reality seems to be that fandom lights up some of the same regions of the brain as religion. Note that they're not claiming this is a common trait of Apple users, but fans. It's not really surprising.
(And sure, they certainly had access to a large sample set.)
What do you think would light up in RMS's brain? Assuming he even let himself get hooked up to a medical scanner that wasn't 100% open software and hardware, that is.
When Red Hat acquired my company back like 11 years ago, I worked with him to try to get our patent into a pool to be used in a GPL-like manner.
I don't think that particular case worked out (we never spent the resources to finish shuffling my patent through the last parts of the process, at least not while I was still at Red Hat), I can tell you from personal experience that he was working on that sort of thing, with sincerity, that long ago.
That's not an argument that developers need multiple monitors. That's an argument that everyone needs multiple monitors.
There are some kinds of development that include specialized developer-only tasks that really can't be done with a single monitor. If you're not talking about those kinds of tasks, then you're talking about general productivity, not what developers need.
The answer isn't universal -- it depends on what your development target is and how your tools work.
Here's a specific example. Know when having two monitors was awesome for developers? Back in the days when one of those monitors was attached to a VGA card, another to a MDA card, and you were debugging full-screen graphical apps under MS-DOS. You could run the full app on the VGA screen, but run the IDE and debugger on the monochrome screen on the same system at the same time. There was no way to do anything comparable with just one monitor.
But if you're programming for the web? Or for an Arduino? Or for an Android phone, testing/debugging real hardware? Some individual work habits may make some developers more productive with more screen real-estate, but not due to anything inherent in what they're doing.
The path through it might be to keep the two groups isolated from each other and not apply processes for the one group to the other group as the change proceeds. Not sure if that'll work, but I figure it may be worth a shot.
If you've got a small team of extremely competent programmers, is excessive process likely to do much more harm than good?
Sure.
If you've got a humungous team of barely-competent cut-and-paste code monkeys that their managers don't know how to evaluate, do you need astonishing amounts of process to get any work out of them?
Yeup.
Can you stop all business activity while you try to change from an organization of the second type to an organization of the first type?
I really think this about punishing Sony for doing evil things.
This would provide pretty good cover for someone who did just want to steal credit cards and other information they could profit from.
(The credit cards aren't the data I'm most scared about. The "answers to security questions" is what I'm most scared about. Suddenly, someone out there has the answer to a billion "mother's maiden name" and "first pet's name" questions. The damage from that is harder to contain than credit card theft, and is the single most troublesome aspect of this from my perspective.)
I believe there's an economic motive just based on observing security breeches surrounding Blizzard and banks. Sure, compromising a bank (or their customers) is potentially a source of more revenue than compromising a gaming company (or their customers), but the banks and our legal system expect bad guys to do that -- they're (on average) more likely to get caught and more severely punished if caught.
A WoW account (for example) is something a criminal can monetize. Is doing so more work than monetizing, well, money? Sure. But it's way lower risk on a variety of fronts, because huge swaths of our society go "oh, it's just a video game, it's not important". The risk/reward ratio looks pretty good, and so in theory we should see a lot of criminal activity surrounding it, and in practice we do.
Makes sense for the same chain of reasoning to apply here, no?
I love the 15C, and have since the mid-80s. Apart from its raw utility, programming it is an awesome way to really internalize how to do low-level programming with a small stack and a few registers..
And just FYI, this is real software from HP themselves:
It's not necessarily stupid for this to be their policy.
It may be stupid for them to admit this policy, if the main result is that patent trolls crawl out of the woodwork.
However, it may not be stupid for them to admit this policy, if the main result is for the shareholders to direct them to no longer follow this policy even if the consequence is lower short-term profits. Or perhaps for them to direct "stop sealing the documents when you do this, so we can evaluate the choices made".
It also may not be stupid if the main result is for policymakers and courts to be more aware of the problem than they had been, and "fix" it (the way Righthaven has been getting fixed).
Just to add to this: the Wii's Netflix channel supprots that widescreen mode. I've got it hooked up to a 42" 1080p TV set, and for a lot of the content on Netflix, it actually looks fine.
(For stuff that's encoded in higher quality in addition to being widescreen, we'll usually use the AppleTV or the XBox360, but if you use a component cable and set things up for widescreen, Netflix on Wii is tons better than many people give it credit for.)
My only complaint with the Unity interface is the requirement for 3D hardware acceleration. The vast majority of Linux systems I use are virtualized, not on real hardware. I have so far not gotten Unity to work on a virtual machine.
I do understand that there are instructions in some places articulating the hoops to jump through to make it work under some VM platforms, and other instructions relating to "Unity 2D" or something -- my casual half-hearted efforts to follow them didn't work, and casual half-hearted efforts are all I'm going to put time into at this stage.
When it gets to the point that I can trivially download a "live CD" image and boot it on a VM and see the new interface... at that time I'll begin to evaluate it.
At that time I'll be asking questions like "how easy is it for me to push a button to completely disable the concept of virtual desktops and all UI traces of them?" and "could I put this in front of my dad or my nephew?". From rumors I've heard, I'm not optimistic about the answers, but at this point there's no reason for me to get worked up about it -- right now I don't have a realistic option to even consider it.
(Result: still sticking with MacOS X for desktop/laptop use, and plain vanilla Debian (without any GUI) on servers and VMs, with the occasional windows box or VM for testing. Maybe that'll change some day, maybe not.)
This incident illustrates once again why you need to put your stuff on your own servers and not someone else's.
Well. Or put your stuff on your own servers as well as someone else's. Cloning your services into various clouds isn't insane as a tool for handling some types of unplanned scaling requirements or some types of unplanned outages. Relying on those clouds introduces risks that were just demonstrated.
Likewise, it'd be nice to be able to run DOSbox on a tablet with good performance. I've got DOSbox on my iPad, and its emulated x86 CPU is good enough for some old DOS software, but performance is not spectacular.
I have a large music collection on vinyl, mostly built up before CDs became a big thing. I didn't start buying CDs until I got my first MP3 player (a "Nike psa[play", nifty little weatherproof player with Diamond Rio guts inside). Suddenly, audio CDs were a delivery mechanism that gave me music I wanted in a format I could easily use, that I could load up onto my devices and then store the original media for archival/backup purposes.
These days, that's the same thing I do with bought DVDs. I don't buy a DVD unless it's something I want to watch over and over (eg. "Cosmos", "Connections") or watch occasionally while traveling (eg. my tai chi workout video), and in those cases, I want to rip the video, load it on to my phone, laptop, and/or tablet, and watch it wherever.
(For stuff I only want to watch once? That, I rent, whether via digital delivery to my XBox 360 or AppleTV, or via Netflix mailing plastic media to our house -- which I don't rip, I just watch it and mail it back.)
From everything I've read, as a mechanism for getting video files for my phone and such, BluRay is considerably worse than DVD, partly because of some crazy moving-target DRM stuff and partly because of the Java integration.
Some day maybe I'll get a BluRay drive for a computer for data purposes, or a game console with a BluRay drive, or something like that. But even then, I can't see getting BluRay movies as long as the DVD version is available for at worst the same price (I won't even pay Netflix extra to mail me BluRay rentals) and is still easier for me to actually use. (Now, if BluRay becomes cheaper than DVD, I'll have to do some thinking.)
For small projects, almost any versioning system will do, CVS was there first and there's no really compelling reason to move...
Actually, RCS was there before CVS (and even that wasn't the first, cf. "SCCS"), and for a lot of my own personal use, when nobody else is editing the files and I just need a revision history and protection against accidental edits, I still use it. It can even be awesome for managing config files (IMHO).
There's multiple kinds of patents. In this specific case, I do not believe we're actually talking about "software patents", but about "design patents", which are the same sorts of things that protect the design of fonts or the design of Coca Cola's bottle. A design patent is kinda this thing that falls between copyright and patent in some respects -- it's all about "the ornamental design of a functional item".
It's really great that there's finally a tool to make life easier for all the developers building Windows Phone 7 apps in C# that want to move their code base to the Android platform!
It's a deliberate choice because the companies are either unable to think of or afraid to attempt alternate mechanisms that could extract some of that money. Offering the same media for a significantly lower price isn't the only option available to them.
Yeup. The argument may or may not be correct. Also, maybe nobody knows how to solve this market issue without introducing other problems. That doesn't mean it's not the argument being presented.
Nope! They are saying that they're trying to maximize profit globally, but are instead leaving money on the table in markets which differ too much from the main ones in which they make most of their money today.
If you go with the option I picked, you'll need a microSD card that's at least 4GB (you're going to "dd" a disk image complete with partition map to it), and the higher speed class you can get, the better, since you actually run off the flash card and ignore the Nook's internal storage (which actually lets you do this without rooting/jailbreaking the Nook at all, which is Fucking Awesome -- power down, take out the card, power back up, and you're restored to factory condition).
The problem is the navigation. On a phone, it doesn't take a lot of movement to move between the "go to previous article" button, the "go to next article" button, or to navigate back up a folder level. The two buttons at the bottom each take up half of the width of the screen, and on a phone that's not a lot of width.
On a tablet, better design would have been for the controls to be either sized or arranged differently. Heck, in landscape mode they could rip the UI off of Honeycomb's GMail app, that'd be much better.
(It's possible that I'm more aware of this than a lot of folks because of how long I've been using handhelds and how many different ones I've used and developed for, going back to Newton, MagicCap, PalmOS, studying the old Pen APIs for Windows 3.1 tablets, using a wide variety of WinCE devices... my oldest "tablet" is probably a Vadem Clio, when its transformer powers put it into tablet mode. I've also got an iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad, and I see how the apps end up customized for the specific usage paradigms. So I'm comparing what Android does to a lot of other things.)
As for using a tablet one-handed, for simple tasks like reading I certainly do expect to. I did it with my eMate (which didn't have a tablet-sized display, but did have tablet-sized bulk), my Vadem Clio (amazing physical form factor, this thing), and my iPad, and the Nook is significantly smaller and lighter than any of those. I want to be able to pull it out and read while I'm standing on a bus holding onto something with my other hand so I don't fall down. With a different UI design, I could do that with my Nook more pleasantly. Proof: with some other apps on it, I can.
Yup, you're correct, there are certainly plenty of apps that work just as well at the big form factor as the small. I can't comment on "most" apps, but there are certainly more than a few.
You mention not "optimizing" for phones though... the thing is, when you do that, you often get a better experience on phones. Most times, I'll take a UI optimized for a particular use over a generic UI, and "phone" and "tablet" are different uses, and often benefit from different UIs. But yeah, "Angry Birds" is an example of an app where it just doesn't matter.
Perhaps surprisingly, ebook readers aren't. On a phone you can hold with one hand and touch both the left and right sides of the screen, so that's a fine way to navigate -- keeps your thumbs from obscuring the text. On a tablet, that requires much more movement, and your thumb/finger is smaller relative to the reading area, so it's better to make sure you can page in both directions from within a small area of the screen (so "swipe, anywhere on the screen, in the direction you want to go" can be better than "tap the edge of the screen in the direction you want to go").
This does come up in games too. Some UI elements you want to scale, other UI elements (like a d-pad) you want to keep a relatively constant size. But absolutely, for stuff like Angry Birds or World of Goo, where you just touch stuff instead of using a separate control UI, that issue isn't there.
(My Nook does run Honeycomb by default, but it's frustrating for me often enough that I'm looking forward to the B&N update next month that brings more apps and a Nook-specific app store to the base platform. I may end up switching back from Honeycomb to what they provide, until Honeycomb catches up further in usability. One thing we'll be able to say about the B&N Nook app store is that every app in it is going to be there with the tablet form factor in mind, since it'll only run on one specific tablet. Which is not to say it'll all be well done...)
Have never understood all these "lack of tablet-optimized apps" BS... it all seems like FUD to me
Want to see the reality of the issue?
Go get a Nook Color and either jailbreak it or make a Honeycomb SD card to boot off or something. Make it so you can install non-tablet Android apps on it.
Now get the official "Google Reader" app for Android and run it.
On a phone-sized device, it's completely fine, because you can hold the device with one hand, and all the controls are within reach of the thumb of that hand. On the tablet-sized device, the UI goes from "nice enough that it gets out of your way and can be ignored" to "pretty darned annoying".
It's not just a matter of resolution or scaling -- UI design for something phone-sized is not the same as UI design for something bigger than phone-sized.
(Under iOS, what you're supposed to do is query the system about which UI paradigm is in effect, or specify for which UI paradigm your software is designed -- that's the "UIDeviceFamily" stuff. That way you don't have to make the decision based on checking pixel counts, leaving the door open for both phone-sized and tablet-sized devices with different pixel counts.)
Slashdot Mirror
The reality seems to be that fandom lights up some of the same regions of the brain as religion. Note that they're not claiming this is a common trait of Apple users, but fans. It's not really surprising.
(And sure, they certainly had access to a large sample set.)
What do you think would light up in RMS's brain? Assuming he even let himself get hooked up to a medical scanner that wasn't 100% open software and hardware, that is.
Webbink is being put in charge? Awesome!
When Red Hat acquired my company back like 11 years ago, I worked with him to try to get our patent into a pool to be used in a GPL-like manner.
I don't think that particular case worked out (we never spent the resources to finish shuffling my patent through the last parts of the process, at least not while I was still at Red Hat), I can tell you from personal experience that he was working on that sort of thing, with sincerity, that long ago.
That's not an argument that developers need multiple monitors. That's an argument that everyone needs multiple monitors.
There are some kinds of development that include specialized developer-only tasks that really can't be done with a single monitor. If you're not talking about those kinds of tasks, then you're talking about general productivity, not what developers need.
The answer isn't universal -- it depends on what your development target is and how your tools work.
Here's a specific example. Know when having two monitors was awesome for developers? Back in the days when one of those monitors was attached to a VGA card, another to a MDA card, and you were debugging full-screen graphical apps under MS-DOS. You could run the full app on the VGA screen, but run the IDE and debugger on the monochrome screen on the same system at the same time. There was no way to do anything comparable with just one monitor.
But if you're programming for the web? Or for an Arduino? Or for an Android phone, testing/debugging real hardware? Some individual work habits may make some developers more productive with more screen real-estate, but not due to anything inherent in what they're doing.
Yeup, I agree.
The path through it might be to keep the two groups isolated from each other and not apply processes for the one group to the other group as the change proceeds. Not sure if that'll work, but I figure it may be worth a shot.
"At night, the ice auditors come."
If you've got a small team of extremely competent programmers, is excessive process likely to do much more harm than good?
Sure.
If you've got a humungous team of barely-competent cut-and-paste code monkeys that their managers don't know how to evaluate, do you need astonishing amounts of process to get any work out of them?
Yeup.
Can you stop all business activity while you try to change from an organization of the second type to an organization of the first type?
Nope.
I really think this about punishing Sony for doing evil things.
This would provide pretty good cover for someone who did just want to steal credit cards and other information they could profit from.
(The credit cards aren't the data I'm most scared about. The "answers to security questions" is what I'm most scared about. Suddenly, someone out there has the answer to a billion "mother's maiden name" and "first pet's name" questions. The damage from that is harder to contain than credit card theft, and is the single most troublesome aspect of this from my perspective.)
I believe there's an economic motive just based on observing security breeches surrounding Blizzard and banks. Sure, compromising a bank (or their customers) is potentially a source of more revenue than compromising a gaming company (or their customers), but the banks and our legal system expect bad guys to do that -- they're (on average) more likely to get caught and more severely punished if caught.
A WoW account (for example) is something a criminal can monetize. Is doing so more work than monetizing, well, money? Sure. But it's way lower risk on a variety of fronts, because huge swaths of our society go "oh, it's just a video game, it's not important". The risk/reward ratio looks pretty good, and so in theory we should see a lot of criminal activity surrounding it, and in practice we do.
Makes sense for the same chain of reasoning to apply here, no?
I love the 15C, and have since the mid-80s. Apart from its raw utility, programming it is an awesome way to really internalize how to do low-level programming with a small stack and a few registers..
And just FYI, this is real software from HP themselves:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hp-15c-scientific-calculator/id318956846?mt=8
It's not necessarily stupid for this to be their policy.
It may be stupid for them to admit this policy, if the main result is that patent trolls crawl out of the woodwork.
However, it may not be stupid for them to admit this policy, if the main result is for the shareholders to direct them to no longer follow this policy even if the consequence is lower short-term profits. Or perhaps for them to direct "stop sealing the documents when you do this, so we can evaluate the choices made".
It also may not be stupid if the main result is for policymakers and courts to be more aware of the problem than they had been, and "fix" it (the way Righthaven has been getting fixed).
Just to add to this: the Wii's Netflix channel supprots that widescreen mode. I've got it hooked up to a 42" 1080p TV set, and for a lot of the content on Netflix, it actually looks fine.
(For stuff that's encoded in higher quality in addition to being widescreen, we'll usually use the AppleTV or the XBox360, but if you use a component cable and set things up for widescreen, Netflix on Wii is tons better than many people give it credit for.)
My only complaint with the Unity interface is the requirement for 3D hardware acceleration. The vast majority of Linux systems I use are virtualized, not on real hardware. I have so far not gotten Unity to work on a virtual machine.
I do understand that there are instructions in some places articulating the hoops to jump through to make it work under some VM platforms, and other instructions relating to "Unity 2D" or something -- my casual half-hearted efforts to follow them didn't work, and casual half-hearted efforts are all I'm going to put time into at this stage.
When it gets to the point that I can trivially download a "live CD" image and boot it on a VM and see the new interface... at that time I'll begin to evaluate it.
At that time I'll be asking questions like "how easy is it for me to push a button to completely disable the concept of virtual desktops and all UI traces of them?" and "could I put this in front of my dad or my nephew?". From rumors I've heard, I'm not optimistic about the answers, but at this point there's no reason for me to get worked up about it -- right now I don't have a realistic option to even consider it.
(Result: still sticking with MacOS X for desktop/laptop use, and plain vanilla Debian (without any GUI) on servers and VMs, with the occasional windows box or VM for testing. Maybe that'll change some day, maybe not.)
Well. Or put your stuff on your own servers as well as someone else's. Cloning your services into various clouds isn't insane as a tool for handling some types of unplanned scaling requirements or some types of unplanned outages. Relying on those clouds introduces risks that were just demonstrated.
Likewise, it'd be nice to be able to run DOSbox on a tablet with good performance. I've got DOSbox on my iPad, and its emulated x86 CPU is good enough for some old DOS software, but performance is not spectacular.
I tend to use DVDs the same way I use audio CDs.
I have a large music collection on vinyl, mostly built up before CDs became a big thing. I didn't start buying CDs until I got my first MP3 player (a "Nike psa[play", nifty little weatherproof player with Diamond Rio guts inside). Suddenly, audio CDs were a delivery mechanism that gave me music I wanted in a format I could easily use, that I could load up onto my devices and then store the original media for archival/backup purposes.
These days, that's the same thing I do with bought DVDs. I don't buy a DVD unless it's something I want to watch over and over (eg. "Cosmos", "Connections") or watch occasionally while traveling (eg. my tai chi workout video), and in those cases, I want to rip the video, load it on to my phone, laptop, and/or tablet, and watch it wherever.
(For stuff I only want to watch once? That, I rent, whether via digital delivery to my XBox 360 or AppleTV, or via Netflix mailing plastic media to our house -- which I don't rip, I just watch it and mail it back.)
From everything I've read, as a mechanism for getting video files for my phone and such, BluRay is considerably worse than DVD, partly because of some crazy moving-target DRM stuff and partly because of the Java integration.
Some day maybe I'll get a BluRay drive for a computer for data purposes, or a game console with a BluRay drive, or something like that. But even then, I can't see getting BluRay movies as long as the DVD version is available for at worst the same price (I won't even pay Netflix extra to mail me BluRay rentals) and is still easier for me to actually use. (Now, if BluRay becomes cheaper than DVD, I'll have to do some thinking.)
Actually, RCS was there before CVS (and even that wasn't the first, cf. "SCCS"), and for a lot of my own personal use, when nobody else is editing the files and I just need a revision history and protection against accidental edits, I still use it. It can even be awesome for managing config files (IMHO).
There's multiple kinds of patents. In this specific case, I do not believe we're actually talking about "software patents", but about "design patents", which are the same sorts of things that protect the design of fonts or the design of Coca Cola's bottle. A design patent is kinda this thing that falls between copyright and patent in some respects -- it's all about "the ornamental design of a functional item".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
Or in other words: it's certainly the case that the appearance of an icon can be protected by patent, if we're talking about design patents.
It's really great that there's finally a tool to make life easier for all the developers building Windows Phone 7 apps in C# that want to move their code base to the Android platform!
If they call it the midichlorian, I'm going to have to slap someone.
It's a deliberate choice because the companies are either unable to think of or afraid to attempt alternate mechanisms that could extract some of that money. Offering the same media for a significantly lower price isn't the only option available to them.
Yeup. The argument may or may not be correct. Also, maybe nobody knows how to solve this market issue without introducing other problems. That doesn't mean it's not the argument being presented.
Nope! They are saying that they're trying to maximize profit globally, but are instead leaving money on the table in markets which differ too much from the main ones in which they make most of their money today.
Do you have a link for a honeycomb image for the nook? I would be interested in running that.
Here's the best starting point I'm aware of:
http://nookdevs.com/Portal:NookColor
If you go with the option I picked, you'll need a microSD card that's at least 4GB (you're going to "dd" a disk image complete with partition map to it), and the higher speed class you can get, the better, since you actually run off the flash card and ignore the Nook's internal storage (which actually lets you do this without rooting/jailbreaking the Nook at all, which is Fucking Awesome -- power down, take out the card, power back up, and you're restored to factory condition).
The problem is the navigation. On a phone, it doesn't take a lot of movement to move between the "go to previous article" button, the "go to next article" button, or to navigate back up a folder level. The two buttons at the bottom each take up half of the width of the screen, and on a phone that's not a lot of width.
On a tablet, better design would have been for the controls to be either sized or arranged differently. Heck, in landscape mode they could rip the UI off of Honeycomb's GMail app, that'd be much better.
(It's possible that I'm more aware of this than a lot of folks because of how long I've been using handhelds and how many different ones I've used and developed for, going back to Newton, MagicCap, PalmOS, studying the old Pen APIs for Windows 3.1 tablets, using a wide variety of WinCE devices... my oldest "tablet" is probably a Vadem Clio, when its transformer powers put it into tablet mode. I've also got an iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad, and I see how the apps end up customized for the specific usage paradigms. So I'm comparing what Android does to a lot of other things.)
As for using a tablet one-handed, for simple tasks like reading I certainly do expect to. I did it with my eMate (which didn't have a tablet-sized display, but did have tablet-sized bulk), my Vadem Clio (amazing physical form factor, this thing), and my iPad, and the Nook is significantly smaller and lighter than any of those. I want to be able to pull it out and read while I'm standing on a bus holding onto something with my other hand so I don't fall down. With a different UI design, I could do that with my Nook more pleasantly. Proof: with some other apps on it, I can.
Yup, you're correct, there are certainly plenty of apps that work just as well at the big form factor as the small. I can't comment on "most" apps, but there are certainly more than a few.
You mention not "optimizing" for phones though... the thing is, when you do that, you often get a better experience on phones. Most times, I'll take a UI optimized for a particular use over a generic UI, and "phone" and "tablet" are different uses, and often benefit from different UIs. But yeah, "Angry Birds" is an example of an app where it just doesn't matter.
Perhaps surprisingly, ebook readers aren't. On a phone you can hold with one hand and touch both the left and right sides of the screen, so that's a fine way to navigate -- keeps your thumbs from obscuring the text. On a tablet, that requires much more movement, and your thumb/finger is smaller relative to the reading area, so it's better to make sure you can page in both directions from within a small area of the screen (so "swipe, anywhere on the screen, in the direction you want to go" can be better than "tap the edge of the screen in the direction you want to go").
This does come up in games too. Some UI elements you want to scale, other UI elements (like a d-pad) you want to keep a relatively constant size. But absolutely, for stuff like Angry Birds or World of Goo, where you just touch stuff instead of using a separate control UI, that issue isn't there.
(My Nook does run Honeycomb by default, but it's frustrating for me often enough that I'm looking forward to the B&N update next month that brings more apps and a Nook-specific app store to the base platform. I may end up switching back from Honeycomb to what they provide, until Honeycomb catches up further in usability. One thing we'll be able to say about the B&N Nook app store is that every app in it is going to be there with the tablet form factor in mind, since it'll only run on one specific tablet. Which is not to say it'll all be well done...)
Have never understood all these "lack of tablet-optimized apps" BS... it all seems like FUD to me
Want to see the reality of the issue?
Go get a Nook Color and either jailbreak it or make a Honeycomb SD card to boot off or something. Make it so you can install non-tablet Android apps on it.
Now get the official "Google Reader" app for Android and run it.
On a phone-sized device, it's completely fine, because you can hold the device with one hand, and all the controls are within reach of the thumb of that hand. On the tablet-sized device, the UI goes from "nice enough that it gets out of your way and can be ignored" to "pretty darned annoying".
It's not just a matter of resolution or scaling -- UI design for something phone-sized is not the same as UI design for something bigger than phone-sized.
(Under iOS, what you're supposed to do is query the system about which UI paradigm is in effect, or specify for which UI paradigm your software is designed -- that's the "UIDeviceFamily" stuff. That way you don't have to make the decision based on checking pixel counts, leaving the door open for both phone-sized and tablet-sized devices with different pixel counts.)