I have just purchased an Acer Iconia Tab A500 as I fancied an Android based Tablet as well as my ipad . It has NVIDIA Tegra dual core processor and runs like lightning was we'll impressed. Anyway the question I have is that the appstore for tablet games on the device is quite small at the minute and called the Tegrazone. So I decide to go to the normal android market and download games from there and just play them expecting them to play in 2x mode similar to how the I pad does and lose some of the clarity. To my surprise they all upscaled to full screen which is 10.1 in the Acers case and lost no clarity at all and played perfectly. Ok so I was wondering if anyone knows why the ipad can not do the same is it hardware related or an Apple ploy to sell more apps ?
It might depend on the game... OpenGL models are usually easy to upscale, think of it as bitmap graphics vs vector, it's kinda like automatic resizing. Anything with 2D sprites will always take a hit on upscaling, unless of course the game has been made with the high-res sprites included (the equivalent of Apple's universal builds). Some of it probably depends on the screen resolution too, the iPad upscaling would be a lot simpler if it were just double the res of the iPhone.
Thanks Midian I'm not very knowledgable about things like that was just very surprised when every normal game looked and played perfectly . I'm pretty impressed with how far the Android Market has come since the last time I had used it too . There is one tablet game I bought for it called Bang Bang Racers and it is better than any Idevice top down racer I have played .
Also checkout Amazon's app market. Gameloft also has it's own store on their website as well. Gaming is coming into its own on Android and with the release of the Xperia Play and multiple tablets being released it'll only get better.
Cheers Scott will check them out and yeah defenitely looks like it could maybe challenge IOS in the next year or so . I originally decided on an Android tab as i wanted Flash player but gaming is excellent too .
You can take an app designed for an Android phone and make it fill the screen of an Android tablet without losing clarity, but does the app actually take advantage of the larger screen size? For example, buttons for controlling a game. Are they simply made larger or are they sized and positioned appropriately for a tablet? Do you end up with a better view in the case of games where there's overlays that cover part of the screen? One thing to note is that the iPhone and iPad have different aspect ratios. Android tablets are the same aspect ratio as an Android phone. You can argue which aspect ratio is better for a tablet, but in any case the iPhone and iPad are different aspect ratios.
As regards too the keys they do just get bigger but of all the games i have played none have been positioned in awkward places . As for overlays no its still the same as its smaller version ie Angry Birds you still cant see the Target etc. But i wasnt really expecting that to be the case it was just that it used the whole screen and lost no clarity that impressed me .Just been reading a few articles from developers of xbox live and PSn games stating they can port there games to Tegra 2 devices and they lose no performace or graphical quality now that is impressive .
I'm curious to see what Nvidia does in the future with the Tegra Zone. I spent some extensive time with the whole thing back at Mobile World Congress and it seemed like they were a little embarrassed of what they had to offer once you stray outside of their cool exclusive tech demos and "enhanced" versions of existing iOS apps. Everyone I've talked to there seems like they have their heads sufficiently buried in the sand, which I suppose is sort of required in the Android world.
Funny coming from someone with head up someplace else. Not that you will, but the new tablets from Samsung and Toshiba are lightyears beyond iPad2.
Hardware specs never have, and never will drive sales of mass market consumer electronics. There's a reason why Apple doesn't print anything more than the storage capacity on the box of their devices. It's irrelevant to everyone but power-users, who themselves are becoming an increasingly irrelevant slice of the market as consumer adoption of these devices increases exponentially. For power-users, this is a very difficult pill to swallow.
I agree it is in its infancy but if Bang Bang Racing is anything to go by it is gonna surpass I device gaming it is a direct port of the xbox live version in every way apart from controls obviously
I think the question is, will Android devs simply call it a day and let apps be auto-upscaled (albeit smoothly) as opposed to making tablet-optimized apps, because that involves no effort at all, yet it at least looks pretty. So far it sure looks like that's the case, though maybe that will change as more people get Android tablets... and demand more then auto-upscaling. It remains to be seen. It seems like, whether you like Apple's approach or not, it does in fact give devs extra incentive to do more then just let the scaling do the job.
I agree with this, but at the same time better hardware paves the way to new features... iMovie/GarageBand on iPad 2 anyone? If Samsung and co. want their superior specs to push sales they have to use it to actually do something.
I think what people are forgetting in this discussion Tegra 2 tablets have only been on the Market for about 2 months as have the mobiles it's just started . I'm in both camps I love IOS gaming but at the same time I see where gaming can go with the Tegra devices . I have been reading all day from loads of top development houses and all of them say that it could be the future of handheld gaming the Tegras are very closed to console quality as games that are already available like Bang Bang and Riptide have proved . Only time will tell but I think Android gaming with the new hardware has come of age .
The high quality games are going to go where it's financially viable for them to go. The only thing that's making any kind of money on the Android market (Tegra Zone included) is freemium or ad-laden crapware. The hardware might be there, but the zillion different store fronts and no unified payment gateway is killing it. Before Android can become anything other than the free phone people get with their contract or the tablet power-users buy because they like the specs, Google really needs to reign in all the fracturing across the entire ecosystem. Unfortunately, doing that kind of goes against all the things they originally set out to do with Android.
You have obviously not had a chance to look at the android game charts in a while the top 40 or so games are fully paid apps most from big software houses. As for too many store fronts there are two the Tegra for the newer phones and the android market place for everyone. As for unified payments you just use your credit card or debit not exactly hard and the good thing with the store also is if its a game you don't like or its buggy you can get an instant rembursement. I'm not being rude but I feel you have a very blinkered view .
I just skip the charts and talk to the developers directly. On paid apps, they are still making less in a month in a high charting position on the Android Market than they make in a day on the App Store.
Which is far from the press releases say from the development sites I have read today . I think time will tell but to say hardware doesn't matter is a bit strange if that was the case why do apple keep improving there's every year .
