Eh, I'd rather not spend more money on battery-powered Atom-based devices. My Aspire One gets terrible battery life as it is. I want more decently spec'd ARM based tablets.

WeTab got 6 h battery life. Show me an ARM based tablet that will do better (rather don't as you probably will find some ). How much do you need? What do you consider enough from a practical point of view. This is not a phone after all.

The point is that at these sizes, 10 inch, battery starts to get irrelevant. The screen draws lots of power, and there are lots of space for batteries in there, even cheap ones.

A phone OS on a tablet is just wrong, poor design, bad engineering. Just because it works doesn't mean it is good, or even is cool.

Video

My Nokia N900 has an 800x480, 3.6" screen, and a PPI of 266(google'd for that number). That means I have a screen that's ~3"x1.8".
This means that a 1024x600 screen should be ~3.85"x2.26", or ~4.5".
A device like that - if the bezel was small enough - a tablet like this could fit in my pocket! Yet, they are using a screen that's a bit over two times the minimum size for that resolution.

Yea... I'm not entirely impressed.

WeTab, the only tablet worth purchasing (besides the iPad)... nah/meh/noway/getouttatown

And the UX with MeeGo on the WeTab = deadful (its like a vomit of ubuntu and windows mobile).

I much rather an Android tablet (10" with trimmed bezel ofcourse) running MIUI but with my own optimization such as:
- with 6 x 6 tiles on the homescreens (for widgets/apps) instead of the 4x4 original
- with adding upto 9 apps into the quicklauncher instead of 6 in the original
- with 6 x 4 tiles within folders (more revealed by swiping down) instead of 4 x 3 original (more revealed by swiping down)
- supporting 4 x 4 tiles (when previewing homescreens) instead of 3x3
- and when you goto the screen to place a widget it should display: 1x4 tiles of homescreens + the widget-box displays 3x4 widgets .... vs the original that has 1x3 homescreen tiles + 2x3 widgets
- and other minor one's found on this list

Video demo 1 -skip to 2min20sec
Video demo 2
Video demo 3
Youtube "MIUI" to find more videos.

Serious intuitiveness + simpleness + customizations + advanced functions(Widgets/LiveWallppr) === WIN!

I agree, I'm sick of all these devices with 1024x600 10" screens. The manufacturers choose these screens because they are cheap, but it really isn't good enough compared to my N900. What I'd find interesting is a 1280x800 6" screen.

If you think about it, that much (>220) PPI is completely unnecessary and this becomes more evident as the screen size increases.

Well to determine if the resolution is too low, just right, or unnecessarily high for any device you need to know:
1) how many pixels
2) screen size
3) the intended distance of device to user

For a 4" phone, if you used VGA (640x480) compared to a WVGA (854x480) at a distace of about 40cm from your face (normal distance), the difference would be so miniscule that its actually funny. If you upgraded to in iPhone4 due simply because of this you were uninformed, and became Apple's bich. Infact, VGA at 5" is still a good quality for a phone, good/average but its no HD mind you.

A 50" plasma has 1080p, do you know the PPI of that? It's 44! Yet viewing on such TV's are not atrocious (depending on brand). Why... because you're seated about 2metres away!

A tablet is larger than a phone, so naturally the user should have it distanced further, but because of the nature of Apps used (eg Drawing) it keeps the user a little bit closer.... so that a typical tablet will be about the same distance as a phone (50cm from eyes).

Going by the mathematics of VGA@5" is acceptable at 50cm, this equals 160PPI. So an acceptable density at 50cm from face is within the range of 150-170PPI.
So for a 10" slate at 50cm, the screen resolution should be ~1366 x 768 (157PPI). And that's the resolution I recommend!

However, did you ask yourself why 1024 x 600? Its because that's the highest resolution offered by Android upto Froyo (Gingerbread is supposed to hit HD). That's why they are used by most OEMs, so they always have the option of marketing it with Android onboard.

Let's start with the "lower grade" tablets (WVGA) and determine the maximum size before they lose sharpness. Those tablets should be no larger than 6.2", where they begin to lose the sharpness.

So let's see how "pathetic" that limit is on larger tablets:
Using this, with that 1024x600 resolution we begin losing sharpness (148PPI) with any screen size larger than 8inch. So the Galaxy Tab's screen really makes sense here.

Well lets see how that resolution handles for 10" screen: we get 119PPI. Which is actually lower than average, but not too bad. User's will notice slightly less sharper images, such as on icons, but not so difference with fast moving pictures or a video.

With that knowledge in mind, WOULD I still personally recommend a:
10" tablet (trimmed bezel) that has low (119PPI) screen resolution, over a 7" tablet (normal bezel) that has a normal (170PPI) screen resolution?

The Answer is yes;
(but not as enthusiastically as before)
because it may not squeeze in any more content and the sharpness will be slightly reduced, what you get are larger text/links/icons and better accuracy when touching the screen.

Have I enlightened anyone?

With the current standard of thick bezel, you can grab the slate naturally as you would a (paper) notepad; there's no need to artificially adapt your gestures to accommodate thinner bezels.

If there's any company that puts so much weight on how their products look. So vain. It's Apple. It's Steve Jobs. I can imagine him having many a sleepness night trying to find ways to shave off the sides of the iPad and still maintain high level of usability. Look at where it's at today.


The thinner bezel looks nicer, but all it does is conjure the many many usability problems I've had with all my past (Windows) tablets/convertibles....

To be honest, I completely disagree. The whole benefit of a high PPI screen is that you have trouble seeing individual pixels - Things look "smooth" vs "chunky".
I have a N770 with its 4.x" screen, and my N900. Do things look sharper on the N900? Heck yea. Which would I prefer? My N900's screen definitely.
I have a ~100ppi 23" desktop screen(1920x1080), and at a distance of 18" or so, I can see individual pixels clearly; a single pixel out of place on a font looks bad, and if something's spaced slightly off its easily noticeable.
I have a bit better, 15" laptop screen that's 1680x1050(Not sure PPI, but its higher). Its significantly sharper than my desktop screen, and I have to have it around 12" from my face to see individual pixels.

My N900 is even better - I really have to strain to see individual pixels, and AA on games isn't even really required for it to appear sharp and clear; On my desktop screen, 4XAA is required for a game to look good. On my laptop, 2X is sort of required.

Personally, I'd love to see a 24" screen with like 3840x2160 - Pixels would be extremely small, and anti-aliased fonts would still look sharp and easy to read. However, that would require dual-link DVI for 60hz, and I doubt its even realistically possible until really cheap OLED tech becomes standard.

If you'd ever played a 640x480 video on your N900, you'd realize that this isn't correct. You end up with around a half-inch of extra pixels, and it's definitely noticeable, even holding it at arm's length.

So, in conclusion, I completely disagree, and don't think you know what you know what you are talking about.

I think the pitfall here is how this particular feature is 'classed'. When you say something is 'necessary' or not, then you get very2 subjective.

ie: Is it a necessity for anyone here to own a 7 or 10" internet tablet?

Generally I agree. But the distance can vary a lot and there's one more element here that I think is crucial, which was the saving grace of past iPhone\Touch's low ppi screens:

- Zoom capability of the OS. (How fast, how easy, how available)

Yes, because you're comparing a 4:3 screen with a 16:9 screen. It's not a direct ppi comparison, you're unnecessarily introducing another element in this comparison.

I did upgrade my 3GS to iPhone4 and I was quite informed and I was still pleasantly surprised and happy with the increase of ppi. It was really useful; for example to determine if the pictures I've taken was properly focused or not.
Although I admit that I'm still Apple's bi+ch.


Subjective. People may mistake this to you having less sensitivity to high quality picture or having low standards.

You forget that the general limiting variable here that limits viewing distance is the user's hand. You don't artificially stretch (and sprain/discomfort) your arms just because you're holding something bigger.

iPad's resolution is not bad, but I am quite certain Jobs will put retina-class display on the next one. I certainly could use a higher ppi on the iPad when reading publications (ie: zinio) on it.

I would guess that the major resistive-force acting against a large ultra-high PPI display is the number of pixels. Pushing all of those pixels on a mobile chipset may be beyond the capabilities of current chips, especially for 3D (a major facet of iOS software). As I understand it, desktop/laptop GPUs struggle to display at high resolutions.

The second resistive-force, I would imagine to be cost. 1024x768 displays at 10" are somewhat common, but something higher like 1920x1200 may be too expensive for the benefit of bragging rights or slightly clearer text.

The third resistive-force, I would imagine is the software resolution. As I understand it, iOS is resolution fixed (unless this is changed with the iPad SDK), and introducing a new resolution may break a lot of apps or split the young iPad market prematurely.

I would actually be surprised if the next iPad had a retina-type display. I would guess that there would be bump in processor spec, perhaps some cameras attached, the announcement of a complementary iPad-mini @ 7", and/or even dynamic LED backlighting for further power savings and AMOLED-esque contrast. But I would actually be shocked if the iPad-line had anything but a 1024x768 display for the next generation.