EagerEyes Shorts

Neven Mrgan thinks the next iPhone might have the same screen resolution as the iPad:

Unless, of course, Apple comes out with an iPad-resolution iPhone. 

On a slightly larger screen that the current one, this would call for the crazy PPI of 341 (the current one is 163). The Droid, by the way, is 267, which I also would’ve called crazy a year or two ago.

I don’t know if a 340-PPI display is possible, affordable, or necessary. What I know is that it would let developers take their newly iPad-ified apps and move them to the iPad a bit easier; I don’t mean literally, since adjustments would still have to be made to account for the general form factor of the device. But it would be a little easier than developing for a completely different resolution.

It’s not going to happen, though, for three reasons:

• Resolution. Even if the next iPhone was the same resolution as the iPad, that would not save developers much time. At the same pixel size, controls would be much, much smaller, so a different UI would still be necessary for the two devices. Apple has introduced a few new UI elements for the iPad, and it’s doubtful that many of them will be available on the iPhone. That is not a question of pixels, though, but a question of usability and fitting the UI to the device. Scaling iPhone design elements up may look clunky, but at least it’ll be usable. Scaling iPad stuff down will be unusable.

• Form factor. The iPhone’s aspect ratio is 3:2, while the iPad is 4:3. This makes sense for the different devices because they are used in different ways. A phone that is mostly held in a portrait orientation needs to be longer so it can show more data and can show the keyboard plus a reasonable amount of text. The iPad is a very different beast that would look oddly long at that aspect ratio. Changing the resolution is one thing, but changing the aspect ratio is quite another. While I don’t doubt that we’ll see an increase in resolution (if not this year, then next), they’re not going to change the aspect ratio of the device.

• Horsepower. All those pixels need to be filled with content. This is already an issue with the Nexus One, which feels slow because it can’t push all those pixels around fast enough. And its screen is still a far cry from 1024x768. The horsepower to drive that many pixels will not be feasible in a phone form factor (and power envelope to keep battery life acceptable) for years.

So while it is quite likely that we will see an increase in screen resolution in the next iPhone, it’s a safe bet to assume something closer to 480x720 or thereabouts, not something crazy like 1024x768.

Posted at 11:49pm.

I was looking for Kaiser Fung’s Numbers Rule Your World on Amazon, and saw that there was no Kindle version. So I figured I’d check with the publisher, McGraw-Hill, if there was perhaps some other kind of e-book (like O’Reilly has for most of its titles).

Googling for the name McGraw-Hill took me to their Corporate Website, which has a convenient little search box in the upper right. So I typed in the title, but only got bogus results. Nothing seemed to match the full title, and the pages were all generic corporate-style stuff.

Turns out there’s a little drop-down box on that search results/refinement page where you can select what you want to search. It defaults to McGraw-Hill Corporate, but it has options like Books and Educational Products. And lo and behold, of course it finds the book once I tell it to search for books.

But why does it search the corporate site first? Isn’t it more likely that people will want to search for your products, rather than your press releases or investor info? You have a lot more customers than investors, so why does your search default to boring corporate stuff?

It’s not that there is an additional step involved here that I can’t be bothered with, it’s the attitude. I don’t care about your org chart or your subsidiaries or whatever. I want information, fast. I want the website that comes up when I search for your name to make sense to 90% of the people. How can you put so much effort into a website and not think about who the visitors are and what they’re looking for?

This is similar to HP’s “license plate” URLs, and I’ve seen IBM do the same (though they seem to have stopped doing it). Don’t tell me your internal structure or your server names. Don’t tell me what you think is important; I don’t care. I care about the stuff that’s important to me. I want a simple URL, I want relevant information.

Is that really too much to ask?

Posted at 10:05pm.