I laughed when I read the article ”Friday Night Fights: What’s Better? The 3.5-Inch iPhone or Android’s 4+ Inch Superphones?”. The Android guy, Vincent, says:
”Why limit yourself to once choice? With that mentality, you mine as well live in a world with one phone, one screen size, one look — you mine as well own an Apple.”
PC people seem to think that multiple choices are always better than a few, no matter what the choices are about. I find that very amusing. How can they ever get anything done? Multiple choices are good in certain situations, but in a lot of other situations it’s better to strive for simplicity in some ”basic building blocks” in order to free your spirit and energy so that you can release your creativity and create something magical, beautiful or awesome.
At the beginning of the 90’s, my little company published DesktopSkolan/the DesktopSchool. It was about basic typography and layout combined with PageMaker. We taught how to work effectively and achieve good results at a basic level. We wanted people not just to ”play around” with all the possible choices in PageMaker, but to learn how to make the choices that make your work easier and better. We believed, and I still believe, that if you learn some basic rules for typography and layout, then you will understand the basics, and then you can start to create more freely.
Our customers were both PC users and Mac users. We got a lot of questions from the PC-users, and I found it rather sad that their questions were about ”computer stuff” like ”how can I get these fonts on my computer?” They had so many obstacles to overcome before they could begin learning from our books. When we got questions from Mac users (which didn’t happen often), they asked about the subject, like, “Can you explain how you count to get the right spacing between paragraphs?”
When I read this article about the iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen and the Android’s 4-inch screen, it reminds me of our customers at the time. If you read the article yourself, you will understand why life becomes much easier with the iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen. The size is chosen carefully. One of its most important features is that you can use an iPhone with one hand. The picture shows the radius of a thumb on both screens (the picture was originally from Dustin Curtis’s blog). I’ve read at least two articles from people who tried using a Samsung Galaxy with the big screen, and they didn’t like having to use two hands. It seems to be an annoying feature.
But the article also points out that it’s more difficult to develop apps for Android than for iPhone because developers have to ensure their apps work on every available screen size.
”First of all, the number of different display sizes available on the Android platform is just another element that exacerbates the operating system’s notorious fragmentation problems.”
Imagine you are an app developer with a great idea, and then comes the part with multiple screen sizes… The app that works well on one size now has to be adjusted to work on several other sizes as well, and somewhere else, more problems will arise, and the app developer will have to put a lot of time and effort into making it work on every screen size. Time that could have been used to improve the app’s functionality. Time that could have been spent on innovation becomes time for irritation and frustration. It’s bound to be more bugs in the apps during these circumstances.
Compare with an app developer that only works with iPhone… I imagine it would be much easier to create an app under simpler circumstances. Easier and more fun. Fun is important.
Free, multiple-choice options are not fun when it comes to smartphones. But as we know from years of experience, PC users seem more interested in building their own computers than actually using them… Android is, of course, a natural development from that. I am perfectly content with a carefully chosen screen size for my iPhone, and I can make multiple choices when it’s time to choose apps. And that’s why I am an Apple fan.
