tomfreak :
Can apple stop using those weird resolution? why not just stick with 720p, 1080p?
They don't have a choice. It's a design decision I never understood. Apple is the company which made its Macs DPI-aware. If you plug in a 20" monitor to a Mac running at 1920x1080 resolution, it automatically calculates the DPI and adjust the size of your fonts so that a 12 pt font on your screen will be the same size as when it's printed on paper. It's brilliant, seamless, and The Right Way to do it.
Then they totally abandoned that approach when they made iOS. The iPod and later the iPhone and iPad rely on a fixed ratio between screen size and screen resolution. That's why when they went with retina they doubled the resolution in both directions - it allowed them to maintain the proper UI and font sizes by simply doubling everything. The iPhone 5 got it's "larger" screen simply by tacking on extra rows of pixels at one end - its width is still the same as all previous iPhones.
The catch to this approach is that if you go with in-between sizes like the iPad mini or the larger iPhone 6, it breaks down. To maintain consistent PPI and thus font and UI element size, you have to use oddball resolutions. Otherwise the fonts and UI elements are too small or too big because they can't scale with PPI.
Android actually works the way the Macs do. There's an internal setting set by the manufacturer which tells Android what your PPI is, and it'll scale the fonts and UI elements appropriately. You can have 1920x1080 resolution on a 5" phone, a 7" tablet, a 10" tablet, or a 12" tablet, and it will just work. Everything scales seamlessly. If you're rooted, you can even change this value if, say, your eyes are getting old and you need bigger fonts and icons. (Very few people print from or do desktop publishing on their phones, so strict adherence to DPI scaling for font sizes isn't as important.)
southernshark :
I'm not sure where people get off bashing the hardware. Typically Apple's CPU is best in class. The only thing it lacks is RAM, but given that Apple Apps are typically compiled rather than running inside a virtual machine, like Android Apps, it hardly matters. I'd be much more concerned about that, honestly. Not that the people griping have any idea what I just said. Having said that, I don't own an Apple, but not because they are bad, just that I'm cheap and tend to lose things.
Apple's GPU is best in class. Their CPU is about average, usually surpassed by CPUs in Android devices within a month or two. That Android is able to do this despite running in a VM is pretty remarkable.
Android 4.4 gives you the option to use Dalvik (the VM) or ART binaries. With ART, the program is compiled when installed. Takes up more storage, but runs quicker, and preserves the hardware-independence advantages of Dalvik. ART is going to be the standard from Android 5.0 and onwards.
apone :
That's the problem; Apple fans always downplay the importance of hardware until Apple says it's important. Case in point, both Tim Cook & Apple have publicly declared that large smartphone screens are "ridiculous" and "3.7-inches is just right" when asked how they plan to compete against the trend of growing screens & phablets. Look at what size screen the iPhone 6 is sporting?...
A better example is resolution. For years, the iPad had the
worst resolution and DPI of any tablet out there. Apple fans always dismissed it when it was brought up as an advantage of Android tablets, saying the iPad's resolution was "good enough." I never saw it mentioned in reviews either, even though it's pretty obvious and distracting if you've ever tried to read text on a pre-retina iPad. (I had a 12.1" 1440x1050 tablet PC long before the iPad ever came out, and I considered it marginally acceptable for representing a printed page on the screen.)
Then the retina iPad came out, and suddenly resolution and DPI became the most important thing in the world to Apple fans. And every comparison had to mention how the Android tablets had worse resolution. I don't really care about iOS vs Android. I try to pick the best tool for the job and user, and I've recommended plenty of iOS products as well as Android products. But it's this flip-flopping of Apple fans which really makes me distrust their reviews and opinions.
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