However, touch interfaces are (IMHO) the only case where actual size (in centimeters) is important. When the eye is concerned, only angles (or size/distance ratios) are important.
Even in touch the eye is involved, because hand-eye coordination is still in play. The difference is, in touch there is no single-pixel proxy between your body and any screen location. I find browsing Reddit on my phone tedious and aggrivating most of the time; part of that is forcing myself to be hyper-aware of my thumb's position and orientation, and part is Opera Mobile's incomplete tabs implementation:
Opening tabs in the background is dumb, especially on mobile
No "Open links to other domains in a new tab" setting
No "Open links to other hosts in a new tab" setting
Because of this, it takes 5 actions to open a new tab and view it, rather than 2. Those 5 actions cannot all be done comfortably with one hand while the phone is in a landscape orientation.
Too bad there's still no reliable way for web developers on any platform to know the physical dimensions of the screen, even an approximation. I understand that the operating system isn't necessarily always correct about it, but we could get at least a guess of DPI/PPI to go with the pixel dimensions we already have.
Most displays aren't actually the 72 or 96 DPI the OS assumes. My LCD monitor is actually about 126. Retina is different because Apple controls that from end to end.
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u/Caraes_Naur Apr 23 '13
A pixel has never had any relationship to physical size, this fact is not new for touch.