Widescreen superior ???
I must take issue with TNT on his point 2. A phone is only practical if it can be hand held which limits its width so if you want a larger screen you've got to go widescreen (or tallscreen in portrait mode). It's a simple geometric fact that for a given screen diagonal the maximum area is a square. As a 4:3 screen is significantly closer to a square than a 16:9 screen, it's got significantly more screen area - actually 12.33% more. What I fail to understand is this fixation with widescreen. You can watch widescreen movies on any screen; you just end up with black bars top and bottom on a squarer screen. I've heard comments like "but you're not using the whole screen!" So what? Do you only drive your car when it has its full complement of passengers? The advantage of having a car with more than one seat is that it's useful when you do need to transport a family. A 4:3 screen is useful when you have an app that needs more area - such as a web page. Let's look at web pages: most are longer than they are wide so portrait view is preferable. But with a tall screen, the width is restricted so you either can't see the full width of the page or you have to shrink it so that it's less legible. OK, we can view it in landscape but with a widescreen that means more vertical scrolling than with a 4:3 screen. I rest my case: a squarer format is much more practical for web surfing and gives more surface area for a given screen diagonal. So unless you find black bars intolerable when watching movies, the better option is 4:3. So well done Apple on your choice of 4:3 for the iPad
