I mentioned the 80px thing at the Palm Pre developer event in London and was told that they are aiming for resolution independence. Those two words make me shudder as an interaction designer. I told them it was ridiculous that they were creating fragmentation with only two devices and for 80px. Hearing your experience only validates what I knew I would run into myself when porting an app from the Pre to the Pixi.

The 80px difference is a great example of a failure to focus on UX (Palm has done a great job otherwise with WebOS – unfortunately they’re currently let down by the hardware a bit). Someone at some meeting should have said: “I don’t care what it takes, we are keeping the resolution the same. Of course, we’re not going to create fragmentation for 80 pixels!”

The exact same thing happens with the Palm Pixie phone compared to the Pre. The 80px less screen estate pretty much butchered my app. Simply ‘making it scale’ as was suggested is a nonsense tip in this context.

Going from small (320×480 to 1024×768) will make any app look crooked I’m pretty sure.

Positive = more (re)work to sustain the iPhone app economy …

Negative = if developers don’t know what fragmentation is, they will in January … unless Apple has some serious card tricks up their sleeves. Hopefully, it’s minimal and confined to screen and UI only.

However if tiling techniques have been employed (similar to 9 patch graphics on Android) then the user experience should be broadly similar for the majority of an application, if the resolution is not massively increased to say 640×960 (being exactly 2x) and will at least provide an easy route to supporting a new resolution.

Unfortunately the day fragmentation truly disappears, is the day we no longer have desirable consumer electronics!

Oh…and I agree. As long as the guts of an app can stay the same and only the UI needs changing, I’d be super happy.