Phone Issues

Amanda and I are discussing phones today.  My current phone is two years old and, notably, is not an iPhone.  I'm the black sheep when I hang out with Amanda, her sister, and her brother-in-law, who each own an iPhone 4S.

So I spent a half hour on my mobile provider's website looking at different phones and reading reviews that are written by people who have owned their new phone a single day and don't understand anything between a 1/5 rating and 5/5.  Almost all reviews were either "It's the best phone ever" or "This phone is the worst ever."  The few reviews that offered constructive criticism of the phones to help inform potential buyers were overwhelmingly marked as unhelpful by fans of the phone too.

So I was reminded once again.  Arguing on the Internet is a pointless endeavour.  I resolve not to bother rating my phone online if/when I change phones.

Proportions Blown out of Proportion?

(blog post updated a few hours later)
 
I've been reading a lot of the iPad Mini reviews since Apple's new tablet was announced a few weeks ago.  I understand reviewers comparing the iPad Mini to various 7" Android tablets like Google's Nexus 7 and Amazon's Kindle Fire HD.  I understand discussing the difference in app quality and availability, pixel density, and price.

What I don't understand is people complaining that the iPad Mini has a 4:3 screen ratio.  Nearly every review of the iPad Mini notes that not having a 16:9 display is an annoyance because widescreen movies will appear letterboxed.

I don't understand why this is such a big deal to some reviewers.  Yes, a 16:9 ratio screen will work better for watching movies.  If you're buying a tablet simply to watch movies on, you'd probably want a 16:9 tablet.

But if you're browsing the web with a 16:9 tablet, I assume you'd either have to scroll the page horizontally all the time (if holding the tablet vertically), or only see a small portion of the wepage at a time (if holding the table horizontally).

Typing would seem to be more awkward on a 16:9 tablet to me, too.  Either the keyboard would be very compressed in portrait orientation or the keyboard would cover so much of the screen that you couldn't see much of what you'd written in landscape mode.

It just seems to me like letterboxing widescreen movies is less of an inconvenience to me than dealing with an overly wide (or tall) screen for everything else.

(portion below added at 2:41am)

It occurred to me just before drifting off to sleep that I had made an error in the above post.  Many 7" Android tablets, including the Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HD have a screen resolution of 1280x800, which is not quite a 16:9 display.  However, I believe most of the above points to still have some merit.