Mobile Device Physical Size

[Richard Gaskin]

Yesterday, in reply to Ralph's post I included these notes about mobile 
metrics:

 > ...it seems that LC's resolution-independence works very much like
 > that of browsers (probably using the same OS APIs under the hood),
 > using logical metrics rather than physical.
...
 > I just ran a quick test to see how well that works:
...
 >                   Diag  Physical    Web    LiveCode PxDensity
 >                   ----  --------  -------- -------- ---------
 > LG G Stylo Phone: 5.5"  720x1280  360x592  360x592   2
 > Amazon F7 Tablet: 7.0"  600x1024  600x976  600x976   1

This morning I had some testing to do so I charged a couple older 
devices and ran my test on each to get:

   Samsung S4 Phone: 5.0"  1080x1920  360x640  360x640  3
   Samsung S1 Phone: 4.0"   480x800   320x508* 320x534  1.5

So now we have data from four devices with very different specs:
- four different resolutions
- four different physical sizes
- four different pixel densities
- four different Android versions
- three different vendors

...and in each case the screen metrics as understood by web browsers 
match those LiveCode gives us (with the one minor exception in the 
oldest phone, noted in the footnote below).

It would be good to know if any of you testing with iOS devices get 
results that don't like up as well as these.

But from what I've seen so far, on Android (and in my limited testing on 
iOS devices a few months ago) it looks like LC's resolution independence 
is very reliable for object placement across devices with very different 
display characteristics.


* I don't believe there's a version of FireFox available now for a phone 
that old (I keep it in its original state with an older Android version 
for testing), so the web test used the browser Samsung included on those 
models.  The difference of 26p is likely a bug (maybe counting the 
status bar height twice?), one I've not seen in newer browsers.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com