While the Galaxy Tab 8.9, the increasingly mythical 7.7 and even the Galaxy Note manage to offer the full 1280 x 800 resolution offered by the big boy 10.1, the 7.0 Plus sadly is asked to make do with a measly 1024 x 600. That’s the same as the original Galaxy Tab and, while we wish this device had the resolution to match its bigger (and even smaller) siblings, it is otherwise a very nice display. Colors are rich and bright, contrast is good and, while it can’t quite deliver the sort of mouth-watering saturation that the company’s Super AMOLED Plus panels can manage, color reproduction seems to be spot-on.
The display is already wide (16:9 or 16:10) and all these folks are pushing video, HD video. So I’m wondering why Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Samsung and others don’t have the balls to spend a little extra for 1280×800 on a 7-inch tablet and offer a much better overall user experience.
Both models have an 800 x 480 screen, which is relatively sharp on the 4.0, with the TFT LCD showing the same bright and vivid colors Samsung’s Galaxy S phones are known for. 800 x 480 looks comically bad blown up to 5 inches, though; everything is enormous, like it’s zoomed in for the partially blind.
The resolution difference is big: 233 v. 187 ppi. Hardware specs matter, especially those of the display, because they have a significant impact on the overall user experience.
Update: Terrence O’Brien, Engadget:
Most of the front of the device is taken up by the four-inch 800 x 480 Super Clear LCD screen which, while not quite as stunning as the Super AMOLED Plus panels on its relatives, is still a pretty decent display. Colors are bright with plenty of eye-popping contrast and viewing angles are excellent, though black levels do leave something to be desired. The WVGA resolution is expected, but still a bit of a letdown. As a device primarily meant for media consumption we’d expect that Sammy would want to deliver the best visuals possible and, although it’s good, it’s not quite great. And the difference between those two things is glaringly obvious when you place the Player 4.0 next to its extremely pixel-dense, Apple-branded competitor. That being said, we did find watching video on the four-inch Samsung much easier on the eyes than squinting at the 3.5-inch panel on Apple’s devices. We still wouldn’t want to sit through a feature length film, but a half-hour episode of 30 Rock was pleasant enough.
via The Wall Street Journal. Greg Joswiak, VP of iPod and iPhone Product Marketing at Apple, spoke about the four keys to Apple’s success at Silicon Valley Comes to Cambridge. I like the fourth one:
If you can’t enter the market and try and be the best in it, don’t enter it. You need that differentiation. At Apple if we can’t be the best then we are not interested in it.
Imagine, by contrast, that tomorrow some company unveiled a cell phone guaranteed to last for 20 years. Who would genuinely want it? It’s not our devices that wear thin, it’s our patience with them.
Me, me, me! I’ll take one!
I’ve been experimenting with something and it’s been about a week. It’s not easy at all, but I needed to get to the bottom of it. I’m trying to figure out whether or not I can live without my iPhone.
Instead of harnessing the power of the phone that revolutionized the entire industry, I’m going whole hog tactile with a Motorola RAZR V3. Edward Tufte would be proud.
If the answer turns out, yes, I can live without the iPhone then it would be really neat if the RAZR could last another 15 years. If the answer is no, I must have my iPhone, then maybe I wouldn’t be too thrilled with a 20-year guarantee. We’ll see by the end of the year.
A few days ago my good friend SooSang asked me what I thought about Malcolm Gladwell’s article on The New Yorker titled “The Tweaker”. I respect Gladwell as someone who gets right down to what really matters, but something didn’t sit quite right when I was done reading. I thought, “Steve Jobs couldn’t have been merely a tweaker.” Today John Gruber wrote “Getting Steve Jobs Wrong” and that got me to read Gladwell’s article again.
Gladwell takes the shouting match between Steve Jobs and James Vincent, the copywriter for the first iPad commercials as evidence that “Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive.”
Jobs: Your commercials suck.
Vincent: Well, what do you want? You’ve not been able to tell me what you want.
Jobs: I don’t know. You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown me is even close.
Vincent: You’ve got to tell me what you want.
Jobs: You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.
Sometimes we can’t express what we feel. This doesn’t happen in technology, in math, in physics, in chemistry. We can always express factual science. What Jobs was seeking wasn’t the result of a scientific formula, a formula with discreet answers. What Jobs wanted was something that made him feel a certain way. He wanted everyone watching future iPad ads to feel something. Jobs wanted Vincent to show him stuff that would evoke an emotional response. Not any emotional response but something Jobs felt deep down, something that was difficult if not impossible to express in words, but still a certain emotion that was clear and precise, to him, in his heart.
In hindsight we know what Jobs was looking for. It’s not easy to explain in words, but whatever it is it is strongly present in Apple’s iPad commercials.
Remember that line about Apple being in the crossroads of technology and the humanities? This “I’ll know it when I see it” is part of the process of creating stuff that is both technically brilliant and emotionally compelling. You just cannot have all the answers when it comes to stuff that deals with emotions.
A tweaker? Jobs was a ****ing tweaker? Jobs was a visionary on a quest to extract and fuse technical and emotional perfection from the most brilliant minds on earth.
via David Cole who was interviewed by Dan Frommer. Mills Baker:
That is: creative ideas embody whole explanatory and speculative matrices, even in their minor details. Compromises dilute the implicit, interdependent elements which account for the form and content of creative ideas, introducing new elements (from others, from committees) which derive from wholly different notions about the problems being solved, the relations between the elements involved, the speculations which are justified by experience and evidence, and so on.
Simply put: Great ideas that are compromised are crap.
And that is why in the process of ruthlessly protecting the entirety of an amazing idea from grand vision to microscopic detail lesser ideas and their possessors are crushed, for the better.
Due to pure PC hardware players such as Hewlett-Packard (HP), Acer, Asustek and Dell not having any advantages to compete in the tablet PC market, sources from upstream supply chain believe these players will gradually phase out from the market with players that have strong content support such as Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, to continue to compete through lowering their hardware prices.
In my opinion Apple will maintain the US$499 entry price of the iPad. There is no reason to lower it since no one else can compete at that price while garnering enough profit margins to sustain their tablet business.
Apple, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. There are three companies but only two viable tablet strategies. One is to seed as many affordable tablets, now set at $199, as possible and sell content, lots of content. The other is to build an absolutely brilliant tablet and sell it for $499 with fat profit margins and access to tons of apps and a bunch of content.
The first strategy profits from content and those profits also need to offset all the costs associated with building and selling tablets. The second strategy generates the majority of profits, large profits, from hardware with some coming from apps and content.
To split hairs, when I say tablet I mean a tablet like the iPad and not a pre-iPad tablet. There is only one tablet option for pure hardware companies and that’s the pre-iPad tablet. Microsoft with Windows 8 and its Metro UI will pour millions to revive the pre-iPad tablet. And pure hardware players will absolutely need to jump on this bandwagon, aggressively improve hardware performance, ruthlessly slash prices, and bestow Microsoft all the profits.
What isn’t missing is a beautiful 7-inch 1024 x 600 IPS display. The panel is the same as the one on the Color, but again I don’t blame B&N for not messing with a good thing. The “VividView” treatment does achieve its mission of reducing glare, but what’s extremely noticeable is how superb the viewing angles are. In a side by side comparison with the Fire, not only was the Tablet’s display brighter — with blacks and dark blues looking even deeper — but I could see everything on the Tablet’s display when looking at the screen at a 90 degree angle, while the Fire’s colors started to fade at that view. That’s not to say the Fire doesn’t have a good display, I just found the Nook’s to be a smidgen better.
John Gruber loves The Verge’s video reviews so I started watching the one for the Nook Tablet. Man, Stern should breath. I felt a sense of suffocation, as I often do when listening to someone talk endlessly as if in a quest to spew out as many words in a single breath. So I had to stop in the middle.
Getting back on topic, the Nook Tablet seems to have a better 7-inch IPS than the Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire uses the LG Display manufactured LD070WS2-SL05 and from what I’ve found viewing angles are slightly less than what you would expect from an IPS LCD panel: 170/170. Usually you get 178/178. Amazon cut some corners on the Kindle Fire while Barnes & Noble went quality with a better display.
Holga: An old school telephone dial with nine filters. Looks like a ton of fun.
via John Gruber. Greg Bensinger, The Wall Street Journal:
Verizon Wireless customers may have to wait more than three weeks for the device, according to the carrier’s website. That compares with as much as 21 days at AT&T and up to 14 days at Sprint Nextel. While some tech blogs have suggested Apple’s manufacturing isn’t keeping pace, the carriers point to unexpectedly strong demand for the handset.
Strong demand for the iPhone 4S was unexpected? Unbelievable.
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