| disolitude said: These are valid points. Unified specs is one of the few advantages Microsoft can count on for Windows RT, being late to the game and seeing the mistakes others made. One has to wonder if the massive pixels are really necessary at this point though. Especially when looking at how Nexus 10 renders those pages and gives the user even less scree realestate than surface with 4X less pixels... In terms of similar spec benchmarks, as someone that has used the iPad 2 for over a year and surface for a month(similar hardware specs minus the RAM), I can see that the Surface is quicker in almost every aspect. I do think that iPad has a major advantage in portrait mode when it comes to browsing just due to the form factor. I find the surface unusable in portrait... |
Agree completely that a 16:9 display is wrong, wrong, wrong in portrait mode at this size. Don't much like it at phone size, either. Makes me cringe when this guy talks about how great the Surface is in portrait mode.
The pixels absolutely do make a difference. Go to a site with small text and/or messy typeface and the low PPI user has to zoom in, while the high PPI user doesn't have to. Who has more real estate at that point?
Most of the screen real estate issues in these videos are software ralated, and nothing to do with PPI. For example, in the Verge loading test, you can see that iPad and Surface show just as much content, but the Surface is cheating. IE has left the page zoomed out, leaving wasted white bars on the sides, while iPad has not. Nexus 10 shows less content, because it's zoomed so that the sides are flush, but Chrome on Android wastes the most vertical space of the three. Software issues are also behind the image search test, where Chrome is obviously reporting itself as having fewer pixels than it actually does and is getting a crummy mobile image viewer instead of one more appropriate for its size.
These videos are a demonstration of the importance of good software design in a tablet (and the challenge of good web design in a post-PC world), not evidence that low-PPI is actually superior to high-PPI. Though I'll certainly admit that there are tradeoffs. The bigger problem with high-PPI screens is power drain, not performance slowdowns.
Now, these idiots putting 1080p displays into smartphones on the other hand...
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
