Tuesday, 1 January 2013

Tablet computers

Difference Engine: Smaller still is smarter

Jan 1st 2013, 20:25 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/01/tablet-computers

WHO really needs a tablet computer? Fashionable as they are, such devices are neither fish nor fowl. Even when fitted with a fast cellular connection, tablets still make terrible telephones. And lacking a proper keyboard, a serious amount of storage and professional-grade applications, they cannot compete with even the lightest of laptops when it comes to getting work done.

Fortunately, for Apple and other tablet makers, the public thinks otherwise. Some 122m tablets were reckoned to have been bought in 2012—a figure that IDC, a market-research firm based in Framingham, Massachusetts, expects to grow to 172m during 2013. Meanwhile, Apple's world-wide share of the tablet market (currently around 54%) is continuing to slip as Android tablets (now 43%) catch up fast and Microsoft flexes its muscles. Android tablets will knock iPads off their perch this coming year, forecasts Finvista Advisors of Hyderabad, India.

Last year, your correspondent was one of the millions who hoped an iPad would meet all his online needs. He was thrilled with everything about the device except its size. After a month of ownership, he went back to taking a laptop on his travels. The iPad has since been relegated to doing casual duty in the living room.

With a screen measuring 9.7 inches (24.6 cm) along a diagonal, the iPad is way too big to fit in a pocket. Though it is lighter than a MacBook Air, that still means carrying a shoulder bag to stuff it into for convenience and safe keeping. Which makes toting a tablet just as much of a hassle as lugging a laptop, but without the latter's better keyboard, faster processor and greater storage capacity.

Imagine, then, the delight on hearing news last summer about Apple's forthcoming iPad Mini with a 7.9-inch screen. Perhaps, finally, there would be a pocket-sized gizmo capable of fulfilling the role your correspondent's sorely missed palmtop computers played in the past. With their six-inch screens, scaled-down keyboards and instant-on performance, palmtops from the 1990s onwards offered little more than two-fingered typing and wimpy wireless connections. But their great saving grace was that, being genuinely pocket-sized, users took them literally everywhere. For reporting on the run, such portability was hard to beat. Your correspondent, living half-way around the world, even slept with his palmtop under the pillow, to check e-mail and news during the night.

When the iPad Mini hit the shelves in early November, therefore, he was waiting eagerly with dozens of other enthusiasts for the local Apple Store to open. But, despite half an hour of hands-on experience, he actually left without buying one. A couple of weeks later, he accepted the inevitable and ordered a Nexus 7 tablet from Google with its Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system (since upgraded to 4.2).

The biggest disappointment about the iPad Mini was its surprising lack of innovation. For those grown accustomed to Apple always stunning and delighting by ratcheting up the level of technology with each new product, a device that comes with innards based on aging (obsolete?) hardware is a serious let down. All the more so when the customer is expected to pay a whopping two-thirds premium ($329 vs $199) over comparable devices from other respected makers.

The Mini's touch-screen display, for instance, uses technology from Apple's pre-Retina era, dating back to iPads of two generations ago. The Mini's dual-core processor, with its stingy 512 megabytes of random-access memory (RAM), was lifted from an iPad that went on sale back in March 2011. Its graphics engine is also two generations out of date. By no stretch of the imagination could the iPad Mini be called cutting-edge stuff.

In an era when tablet designs are refreshed at least every six months, users today should expect nothing less than a quad-core processor, one gigabyte of RAM, and a screen resolution offering a good deal more than a paltry 163 pixels per inch (ppi). The seven-inch displays on Android tablets like Google's Nexus 7 and Amazon's Kindle Fire HD both provide 216 ppi. Barnes and Noble's ground-breaking Nook HD delivers 243 ppi. And Apple's own Retina display is capable of 264 ppi on a full-sized iPad and a stunning 326 ppi when crammed into an iPhone 5.

The Mini's only redeeming feature is its exquisite packaging, being a quarter thinner and weighing less than half as much as its bigger sibling. Even so, one cannot help but think that the late Steve Jobs—had he ever been persuaded (doubtful) to bless a four-fifths-sized iPad—would not have allowed the Mini out of the door in its present state. Nor, for that matter, would he have permitted a half-baked product like Apple Maps to see the light of day. Perhaps there is some truth in the claim that, in the absence of Jobs, Apple is now more interested in litigation than innovation. If so, it is a sad day for all who have championed the company for its creativity and pursuit of excellence.

Those disappointments, and more, your correspondent might have excused if only the Mini had been a little narrower. At 5.3 inches wide, it is still too bulky to hold comfortably in one hand, and way too wide to fit in a pocket. That means lugging it around in a case, just like its bigger brother. In comparison, seven-inch Android tablets like the Nook, Fire and Nexus measure five inches or less across, making them far easier to grasp in one hand—and capable of being carried in an inside or back pocket.

The Mini's size problem stems from the 4:3 aspect ratio of the original iPad—a format inherited from old-fashioned cinema screens, cathode-ray television sets and computer monitors from days gone by. As such, it remains a handy shape for displaying web pages. But it wastes precious screen area when showing films and videos, leaving large black "letterbox" bars top and bottom.

By contrast, practically all seven-inch Android tablets have adopted the 8:5 aspect ratio of today's wide-screen television sets and flat-panel displays. Apart from being close to the "golden ratio" of 1.62:1, based on a logarithmic spiral and beloved of renaissance artists and modern designers alike, the modern display format uses the screen area more efficiently, especially when showing video.

There is a good reason why Apple has stuck with the iPad's boxy format. The 275,000 gorgeous apps that have been composed especially for the iPad would have had to be rewritten if the Mini had a screen of different proportions. Android tablets with seven-inch displays can get away with simply scaling-up the 700,000 or so apps developed for Android phones of similar proportions.

Those Android apps would, of course, look a lot better if, like the iPad's, more of them had been written specifically for a tablet's bigger screen. But the point is that apps developed for Android phones with four-inch screens are good enough when scaled up and mapped over the high resolution seven-inch displays used by the Nook, Fire and Nexus.

Your correspondent lives in hope that Apple's next edition of the Mini will have a true seven-inch screen and the 16:9 proportions of the new iPhone 5. That would be a real one-handed, pocket-sized tablet that could double as an e-reader for books at bedtime. He would carry such an iPad everywhere and even sleep with it under the pillow. In the meantime, the Nexus 7—with its flawless multitasking, top-notch notification scheme and more than adequate apps—will do just nicely, thank you.

The big picture

The world is getting wider, says Charlotte Howard. What can be done about it?

Dec 15th 2012 | from the print edition

Source: http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21568065-world-getting-wider-says-charlotte-howard-what-can-be-done-about-it-big

IT IS LUNCHTIME at Eastside Elementary School in Clinton, Mississippi, the fattest state in the fattest country in the Western world. Uniformed lunch ladies stand at the ready. Nine-year-olds line up dutifully, trays in hand. Yes to chocolate milk, yes to breaded chicken sandwiches, yes to baked beans, yes to orange jelly, no to salad. Bowls of iceberg lettuce and tomatoes sit rim to rim, rejected. Regina Ducksworth, in charge of Clinton's lunch menu, sighs. "Broccoli is very popular," she says, reassuringly.

Persuading children to eat vegetables is hardly a new struggle, nor would it seem to rank high on the list of global priorities. In an age of plenty, individuals have the luxury of eating what they like. Yet America, for all its libertarian ethos, is now worrying about how its citizens eat and how much exercise they take. It has become an issue of national concern.

Two-thirds of American adults are overweight. This is defined as having a body mass index (BMI, a common measure of obesity) of 25 or more, which for a man standing 175cm (5'9") tall means a weight of 77kg (170 pounds) or more. Alarmingly, 36% of adults and 17% of children are not just overweight but obese, with a BMI of at least 30, meaning they weigh 92kg or more at the same height. If current trends continue, by 2030 nearly half of American adults could be obese.

Americans may be shocked by these numbers, but for the rest of the world they fit a stereotype. Hamburgers, sodas and sundaes are considered as American as the Stars and Stripes. Food at state fairs is American cuisine at its most exuberantly sickening. At the Mississippi fair, a deep-fried Oreo biscuit's crispy exterior gives way to soft dough, sweet cream and chocolate goo. It is irresistible.

The rest of the world should not scoff at Americans, because belts in many other places are stretched too, as shown by new data from Majid Ezzati of Imperial College, London, and Gretchen Stevens of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Some continental Europeans remain relatively slender. Swiss women are the slimmest, and most French women don't get fat, as they like to brag (though nearly 15% do). But in Britain 25% of all women are obese, with men following close behind at 24%. Czech men take the European biscuit: 30% are obese.

And it is not just the rich world that is too big for its own good. The world's two main hubs for blub are the Pacific islands and the Gulf region. Mexican adults are as fat as their northern neighbours. In Brazil the tall and slender are being superseded by the pudgy, with 53% of adults overweight in 2008. Even in China, which has seen devastating famine within living memory, one adult in four is overweight or obese, with higher rates among city-dwellers. In all, according to Dr Ezzati, in 2008 about 1.5 billion adults, or roughly one-third of the world's adult population, were overweight or obese. Obesity rates were nearly double those in 1980.

Fat of the land

Not long ago the world's main worry was that people had too little to eat. Malnourishment remains a serious concern in some regions: some 16% of the world's children, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, were underweight in 2010. But 20 years earlier the figure was 24%. In a study of 36 developing countries, based on data from 1992 to 2000, Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina found that most of them had more overweight than underweight women.

The clearest explanation of this extraordinary modern phenomenon comes from a doctor who lived in the 5th century BC. "As a general rule," Hippocrates wrote, "the constitutions and the habits of a people follow the nature of the land where they live." Men and women of all ages and many cultures did not choose gluttony and sloth over abstemiousness and hard work in the space of just a few decades. Rather, their surroundings changed dramatically, and with them their behaviour.

Much of the shift is due to economic growth. BMI rises in line with GDP up to $5,000 per person per year, then the correlation ends. Greater wealth means that bicycles are abandoned for motorbikes and cars, and work in the fields is swapped for sitting at a desk. In rich countries the share of the population that gets insufficient exercise is more than twice as high as in poor ones.

Very importantly, argues Boyd Swinburn of Deakin University in Melbourne, diets change. Families can afford to eat more food of all kinds, and particularly those high in fat and sugar. Mothers spend more time at work and less time cooking. Food companies push their products harder. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that heavily processed food may have helped increase obesity rates. Softer foods take less energy to break down and finely milled grains can be digested more completely, so the body absorbs more calories.

These global changes react with local factors to create different problems in different regions. Counter-intuitively, in some countries malnutrition is leading to higher obesity rates. Undernourished mothers produce babies who are predisposed to gaining weight easily, which makes children in fast-developing countries particularly prone to getting fat.

In Mexico unreliable tap water and savvy marketing have helped make the country the world's leading guzzler of Coca-Cola: the average adult consumed 728 servings last year. In America junk-food calories are often cheaper than healthy ones. Suburban sprawl and the universal availability of food have made the car the new dining room. In the Middle East, Bedouin traditions of hosting and feasting have combined with wealth to make overeating a nightly habit. Any inclination to exercise is discouraged by heat and cultural restrictions. In Beijing teenagers and office workers cram the fast-food restaurants along Wangfujing. Even home-cooked Chinese meals contain more meat and oil than they used to. Doting grandparents shower edible treats on scarce grandchildren.

Together, these disparate changes have caused more and more people to become fat. Many cultures used to view a large girth with approval, as a sign of prosperity. But obesity has costs. It lowers workers' productivity and in the longer term raises the risk of myriad ailments, including diabetes, heart disease, strokes and some cancers; it also affects mental health. In America, obesity-related illness accounted for one-fifth of total health-care spending in 2005, according to one paper.

A huge new global health study, led by Christopher Murray of the University of Washington, shows that since 1990 obesity has grown faster than any other cause of disease. For women a high BMI is now the third-largest driver of illness. At the same time childhood mortality has dropped and the average age of the world's population has risen rapidly. In combination these trends may mark a shift in public-health priorities. Increasingly, early death is less of a worry than decades spent alive and sick.

It is plain that obesity has become a huge problem, that the factors influencing it are fiendishly hard to untangle and that reversing it will involve difficult choices. Radical moves such as banning junk food would infringe individuals' freedom to eat what they like. Instead, some governments are cautiuosly prodding their citizens to eat less and exercise more, and food companies are offering at least some healthier foods.

In a few places obesity rates seem to be levelling, but for now waistlines in most countries continue to widen unabated. Jiang He and his colleagues at Tulane University have estimated that by 2030 the global number of overweight and obese people may double to 3.3 billion. That would have huge implications for individuals, governments, employers, food companies and makers of pharmaceuticals.

from the print edition | Special report