what do non optimzied apps look like

[allan473]

I have an HTC EVO and plan to buy a tablet. The Xoom looks really nice but can someone explain what non optimized apps will look like on the Xoom.

(My wife thinks we should get the iPad2 as it has many more optimized apps. I don't have an answer for her. Help please.)

Allan

 

[Vudumedic]

Some just won't work. Some aren't displaying correctly and some can crash the system. I wouldn't worry about it much though. If I remember correctly the sdk for Honeycomb was released two days before the Xoom was which means mostbdevelopers didn't have any kind of lead on being able to build for this format. Given a few weeks I am sure that the number of apps optimized for Honeycomb is going to start growing exponentially it just takes a little time.

 

[thegunslinger1]

It really depends on the the App, some apps look just fine, other apps look like they are the size of a cellphone screen. It is exactly the same way with ipads, the wife has a ipad and itouch, the apps she paid for on the itouch look like the size of an itouch in the center of the ipad. Every day more an more Xoom apps are hitting the market place. If you are concerned with apps hold off on the purchase for a week or so.

 

[allan473]

It really depends on the the App, some apps look just fine, other apps look like they are the size of a cellphone screen. It is exactly the same way with ipads, the wife has a ipad and itouch, the apps she paid for on the itouch look like the size of an itouch in the center of the ipad. Every day more an more Xoom apps are hitting the market place. If you are concerned with apps hold off on the purchase for a week or so.

In the Apple store there is an * by apps that are iPad optimized so you know what you are getting. As far as I know there isn't anything like that in the Android Market.

I am surprised you feel that apps will be Xoom optimized in a week or so. That makes me feel better aas I won't be buying for a month or so.

 

[Drew2u]

I can provide two examples of non-optimized apps:

Password Safe is a for-fee Password Manager that looks and works great on my SmartPhone. However, on my Xoom, it does not scale AT ALL. It appears on the Xoom with huge black borders around the left, right and bottom edges, and visually is the same size as if it was displayed on the phone. It functions exactly as it should, but clearly is not scaling.

There there is Andoku Sudoku, my favorite free Sudoku game for Android. On the Xoom, it properly scales the play ares, so the 9x9 grid expands perfectly with the top, left and right edges touching the end of the screen. However, the Sudoku "keypad" with keys 1-9, Clear, Undo, etc., are displayed below the grid in the original phone size, completely unscaled, with much wasted space around it.

Some apps definitely handle large screens better, and with the introduction of fragments for Honeycomb and now the libraries going back to 2.2 (?) that let fragments run in older versions of Android, I'm sure a lot of the developers are thinking of ways to redesign their apps to take advantage of the new options.

 

[jerrykur]

I have an HTC EVO and plan to buy a tablet. The Xoom looks really nice but can someone explain what non optimized apps will look like on the Xoom.

(My wife thinks we should get the iPad2 as it has many more optimized apps. I don't have an answer for her. Help please.)

Allan

Actually, your wife is correct. For quite a while the iPad is going to have a large lead in apps that take advantage of the larger screen. A key difference in most apps we develop is that the larger screen let's you have multiple UI elements visible at the same time. A classic example is a mail client which on a tablet has on a single screen the list of messages on the left and the current message on the right. When this is done on a phone the list of messages is on one screen and the message text is on another screen. And since the phone version of the app is coded with separate screens there is no way for it to take advantage of the extra screen real estate.

 

[voghan]

Some apps don't need any changes or might want to make small changes. I think more developers will adjust there apps once they get hardware to test on. A couple games I play just need higher resolution images. Some apps have a lot of open space. Others stretch to fill the screen. So far it hasn't botheed me much.

 

[radsaq]

Completely incorrectly-written apps (mostly bad ports of iOS apps) will display phone-sized with huge borders on 3 sides. Properly-written apps will scale to the size of the screen, but some UI components (like buttons on toolbars) may be scaled to silly sizes.

 

[accordngs]

To be honest I haven't had bad experiences with non optimized apps. Most of them are just bigger versions then they look on my phone. I haven't had problems crashing as of yet.

Some of the non ootimized apps I use are engadget, where, woot me, pandora, gtunes music, twitter tune in radio...etc.

Maybe I've just been lucky, but so far non optimzed apps haven't been a big deal to me.

 

[BasPilot]

Some of the apps I have used so far have been not optimzed and they show up as if they are the same size as the phone I have, the fascinate. I can literally hold my phone on top of the xoom and see the same size. For example is the app called Daily Dilbert. I will keep it because it is cool.