It's no surprise that the iPad and iPhone are the vectors for better apps. Apple has very well-thought-out human interface guidelines for iOS, and it enforces those principles in its app review -- developers are strongly discouraged from creating new approaches for what Apple has already figured out how to do well. There's some discipline that developers can't easily escape, as they can for in-house projects or when writing apps for "whatever you want to do is fine" OSes such as Windows, Linux, and Android.

This is seriously the most well thought-out article on Infoworld...EVER.

Developers of mobile, desktop and web apps should all read this....NOW.

Watching this and reading "Tapworthy," something became quite clear to me (beside the really rough zooming and screen redraws on the Windows device): Microsoft doesn't understand the significance of 44px. They're squeezing standard Windows controls and UI elements onto a touch device without consideration of the size of those controls. The average human finger needs a UI element to be at least 44px, roughly, in order to provide consistent and dependable response to taps. That Outlook ribbon and the taskbar don't appear to give that much room to the finger.

The visual clutter in the Windows apps on that device also showed that they were not designed for a device with the size and human-device interaction of a touch tablet. This is what makes or breaks a device.

* First of all, note the two-line app name. Not a wise design decision for a device with a limited screen size
* Email icon for Text Messagin'
* Different names for the same app: "Text Messagin..." and "Text Mess"
* Replacing a letter with three characters that together take up more space than the one letter: "Text Messagin..." vs. "Text Messaging"
* Inconsistent status bar icon heights
* Music icon looks like a push-button or HAL with it's "eye" closed. Take your pick.

It's poor UI design decisions like these that make certain devices cold and impersonal. It's the oft-maligned attention to fit and finish that makes other devices personal and "friendly."