If not the ipad then what instead?

[famousringo]

superchunk said:

ICS is only a few months old and is now rolling out to all tablets and some phones. ICS is a perfect bridge between the phones and tablets and all between. It has SDKs to handle the screen sizes more effectively and allows developers to make one app (not two as in iPad) and have multiple different viewing UIs to best fit the screen size. For Android, where OEMs make a large variance of platforms, this makes perfect sense. But iOS is not as important as there is only a very small set of possible views. So simply putting out a 2nd app for iPad is simple.

Just a small correction, many iOS apps are packaged with both an iPad and iPhone UI. They're called universal apps, and they've been a development option since the iPad was introduced.

Many developers do choose to publish distinct iPad and iPhone apps, but they generally do it for the money, not due to any technical limitation. Either they feel that if you're using an app on two devices you should buy it twice, or they feel they should get paid for the non-trivial task of redesigning the UI, or they just want to take advantage of the generally higher ASP of apps for iPad while remaining competitive in the iPhone software market.

But you're right, designing two UIs is a much simpler task than trying to support all the diverse screens of Android devices. Do you have any screenshot examples of an app built before and after 4.0 and how the UI actually changes? I'm curious.