[not_an_alien]

iPhone devices will see fragmentation soon too. iPad has a different resolution, the next iPhone will too. The problems you see with Android today are just problems that Apple is holding on but that will have to be faced in the future - it won't be the same 320x480 device anymore.

The solution - proper placement, scaling, different layout flow methods - have been around for ages, and it's up to developers to employ them.

And because Android devs had to deal with them already, I can't wait to see the barrage of shit that will happen when devs unprepared for it have to deal with the new iPhone resolutions.

[jcsiracusa]

"it won't be the same 320x480 device anymore."

Well, it'll be 640x960 which is a nice integer multiple of the current iPhone resolution, allowing older apps to remain visibly unchanged without and code changes.  As for the iPad, it's distinguished from the iPhone and iPod touch not by its resolution but by its size, necessitating new UI for that reason alone.  I expect Apple to continue along these lines, requiring UI designs tailored to a few physical screen sizes, using integer multiples of existing resolutions to insulate developers from these changes.

[ZeroGravitas]

No-one seems to mention the downside of this approach. The iPhone is going to jump from what has always been an okay resolution but is now becoming low resolution, to what is going to be a high resolution but not for very long because very similar phone resolutions have been available for about a year now. Newer devices will continually increase the resolutions available but Apple can't improve on theirs until they double height/width, and quadruple pixels again.

Similarly the iPad doesn't have steller resolution, and unless they want the dreaded fragmentation, they'll not be able to do anything about it until they can double/quadruple the screen from what it is now.

By locking themselves into these resolutions they wander far from the display screen sweet-spot either shipping cheap, low-res displays or expensive, high-res displays. They can't even go to triple current resolution, as that would still look grubby on the middle device without a separate image which defeats the point.

And, apart from certain types of apps, it doesn't buy them anything. When displaying video or images, no difference as it's just scale to fit regardless. When displaying text in books or websites, they take the quality hit whenever they're not at the top of the resolution cycle. In return they get app UIs that are basically hand-drawn pictures and grid-fitted pixel art.

It's an engineering trade-off, and for my particular uses, it doesn't really pay off.

[spot]

not for the iPad.