The feature that Apple forgot…again
Many people were disappointed about the iPad 2. It lacks a USB slot, SD card reader, 4x resolution display, etc. I however was more disappointed about another feature they “forgot”.
The iPad now has not only 65000 apps available (according to Apple), but also several hundred thousand extra apps that are really iPhone apps that just happen to work on the iPad. These run at 320×480 though, so if you want them (semi) full screen you need to run them in 2x mode, which scales up the app 4 times (2x in both directions). It looks OK for some apps, mostly games, but as soon as you need controls (buttons, tabs etc) or have text it looks very upscaled and pixelated.
The issue I and many others have here is that Apple could easily fix this. The iPhone 4 has a higher resolution 640×960 display called Bob which most apps now support. If the iPad would just display these apps in 640×960 instead of scaling up 320×480 to 640×960 then we would still have upscaled apps but at least they would look good. Maybe Apple wants to preserve that feature for the iPad 3 or maybe they’re afraid it’ll make developers think twice about making iPad specific apps, who knows. There is a hack for jailbroken iPads that can do this so Apple needs to get their magnetically attached heads out of their asses and get on this issue right now. Between this and the missing information about iPad 2 RAM, Apple is really starting to piss me off more and more.
