Resolution issues with mobile games

When dealing with resolution, mobile phones present the highest variability. Classic phones, those which used to be the most common devices some years ago, had screen resolutions of 176x208 pixels, while recent iOS and Android based smartphones can range anywhere between 320x240 to 1920x1080 pixels for the latest Samsung Galaxy S4.

There are even more options when taking tablets into consideration. Apple iPad screens range between 1024x768 of first generation models to the 2048x1536 of third and fourth generation. The Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700, the fastest Android-based tablet available as we write this book, has a screen resolution of 1920x1200 pixels; the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Google Nexus 7 have both a screen resolution of 1280x800 pixels. The list of options is very long.

This exceptional variety within mobile devices poses two problems.

The first is with smaller screens of older cell phone models: when the screen size is so reduced, every...