Thursday, July 12, 2012

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean uses three different layouts for different tablet sizes and smartphones


Jelly Bean continues to give us surprises. If you thought you know everything here is that after the new Recovery Journal, now comes the third official custom Ui. It really is not a "novelty in the strict sense" because this UI is that we find on the Nexus 7. Jelly Bean will use different layouts for different tablet sizes. A Google spokesperson confirmed that 10-inch tablets will retain their landscape orientation and bottom-right notification setup even after the 4.1 upgrade. So, yes, the way Jelly Bean looks on a tablet will depend on the tablet's size; the OS adapts itself to the device in order to deliver (what Google sees as) the optimal user experience for that particular screen size.
  • Jelly Bean smartphone interface (Galaxy Nexus)
  • Jelly Bean Interface Tablet 7 (Nexus 7 and others)
  • Jelly Bean Interface Tablet 10 (similar to the current ICS Tablet)
But what changed between these interfaces? Mostly we find a different handling of the notification. Below an image that sums up the 3 different options:




As we can see while the smartphone and tablet UI is pretty much the same course with ICS use on the innovations introduced by Jelly Bean, about 7 inches Tablet new UI are created specifically to take advantage of this type of screen. Notifications are sliding downward, do not occupy the entire screen and do not get to the bottom while keeping the style of the smartphone version.
The differences do not end here of course. The same home Launcher, is different in the three versions. Smartphone in fact will have the classic layout that we saw on ICS, the same thing about 10inch  Tablet, but 7 inch version will be a mix of tablet and smartphone:

Although the Nexus 7 can not turn it horizontal and have an interface similar to smartphones, we find a greater number of icons in the bottom bar, many more lines in the home to accommodate more items and buttons on screen identical to smartphones.
A change are also the applications. Gmail for example on the smartphone does not display double column, while both of 7 inch and 10 inch Tablets 10 Jelly Bean will use divided interface:

As we see the Nexus 7 shows GMail as the Tablet 10 inch creating a real merge between the two interfaces and offering in fact a new one.
The question is if this is really confusing?It's a legitimate questions because two separate interfaces for smartphones and Tablet may already be more than sufficient for all needs. Apparently Google is focusing on segment 7 inches and wants to offer a user experience better than the one apparently you can not get with the classic 10-inch tablet interface.
As we know, changing the dpi of the system, you can see the different interfaces on their devices and smartphones to date are set to 320 dpi to 160 while the Tablet. This new interface should appear around 220 dpi, offering a real mix of the two previous alternatives.Of course it only with Jelly Bean.

1 comment:

  1. Maybe that's why a lot of the 'tablet' apps on Google Play don't work on the Nexus 7?

    http://rnraa.com/nexus7notworking

    ReplyDelete

ShareThis