Higher-res screen?
 

Are there any plans to get a higher-res screen on the successor to the n900? Although I can use the n810 (and therefore likely the n900) for reading articles (two-column PDFs) in evince (portrait mode FTW), I have to scroll up and down the screen since the res isn't quite high enough for a full page. My EEE 901 can do it just fine, so I suspect that the 1024x600 screen is the minimum resolution for reading a full page of PDF.

So, the question is are there any plans on the table to up the screen size for Harmattan's corresponding device? We can't stay resolution king forever at 800x480! :)

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Really? For a 3.5" screen...?

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Absolutely. I can definitely see the difference.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Oh, I'm sure the difference will still be visible.

What I meant was, the additional detail between 800x480 vs 1024x600 on a 3.5" screen will need to be seen extremely closely or with a loupe to be useful\practical.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Who says that all Maemo devices from now on have to have a 3.5" screen?

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Kate Alhola's "Qt on Maemo" presentation made strongly suggested that Maemo is specifically for "800x480 touch screens" for the foreseeable future.

Who knows, we might even see a 3.0" Maemo screen in the future. But again, Kate's presentation strongly suggested that we won't see it on "small phones", so I don't expect to find Maemo on (e.g.) a 2.0" screen.

Regards,
Roger

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

How much more hires do you want the 3.5" screen to be? It is already unreadable when the fonts are rendered at maximal screen resolution. With a bigger screen, it would make sense.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

The more pixels you have, the slower the device becomes. On some levels it is almost directly (inversely) proportional. The device would be already faster if the display resolution would be lower. So yes, it's fun to dream, but you need to be also aware of what the drawback is. :)

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

I'd be all for it if it's "FREE": in terms of production cost, development costs and operational cost. But that's never the case.

Production cost = higher price per unit
Development cost = there may be a need to make additional UI assets OR longer testing because you're targeting multiple 'platform' (loosely used, meaning 2 different resolutions).
Operation cost = Eats up more CPU\GPU during operation. Uses more RAM and storage space if higher resolution assets are used.

So if the payoff is worthwhile, then by all means go for it.
But if you're not getting significantly better experience from it or if it may even lower the system's performance because it taxes more resources, then wtf?

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

I disagree. At least on my n810, a full article page (in portrait mode; full height, because the page is too wide for the display) being accommodated on the screen causes the text to almost but not quite be legible (the letters are smudgey). This is not true on my EEE 901.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

My eyeballs would implode

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

@solarion: ok, again the key here is the screen size.
even if you can squeeze 1920x1080 onto a 3.5" display and it may have the resolution to show 8 pages on screen at the same time but will it be practical to use it on that size?

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

3.5" 800x480 is so eye-burning crisp that increased resolution will just significantly raise the cost and nothing else.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

I wish I had your eyesight, I'm having serious trouble with the N900 as is - my eyes simply fail me, after 15 mins of reading it takes me 15 more minutes to adapt back to my natural dioptry. The N810 screen when picked up after the N900 looks huge (it's much more pronounced than the difference when going DOWN to the 3.5" size). Also, I kind of miss the buttons as fullscreening as-is on Fremantle is just not that much fun - especially for apps like the RSS reader, I hope this changes until the final release :(

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Mabye the extra 0.6" makes a difference. It's possible. I'll know whenever I can afford an n900 or successor. I'm just sayin' that at least on the n810, the resolution is *just* a little to low to make reading a full column possible. The text is just a *little* too smudgey. If you add 60% more pixels, it works fine. That's the empirical data with which I have to work.

The workaround is to zoom a little, and then pan up and down, which sucks.

Maybe my perfect device for reading articles will never exist. :(

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

I don't think the performance will decrease, considering the 770 could run 800x480 without significant problems. A device with about 10 times more processing power should be able to handle a 2 times higher resolution.

The real questions are whether the difference will be notable, and if that difference will be worth the increase of the cost.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

4.3" screen and 1280x720 would be very nice. That's what I want in my next device (after the N900), and yes. 800x480 is nice, but it's not perfect. More is better imo.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Agreed, but 800x480 is probably the optimal res for OMAP3.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

There appears to be confusion between resolution and UI size.

No reason why a 1280x720 screen on 3.5inch cant work. You just need to optimize the fonts and rendering. The Linux boys are moving towards SVG for UI elements so that they scale without jaggies for instance.

Mike C

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

The main problem here is that your intended document was not designed to be displayed in small screens in the first place. If it was, then it should support reflow-able text.

To take this issue to the extreme, imagine trying to read a plain 'ol newspaper rendered as a PDF. You can ask for a 2560x2048 3.5" screen (or whatever) to be able to render the whole width of the content but you'll still end up finding the bottleneck elsewhere (your eyes).

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

The 770 didn't run 800x480 well, the framerates were generally bad. Let's not fool ourselves with that.

The performance would decrease with increased resolution. What the cpu speed is doesn't have a direct correlation here. The display bandwidths are mostly separate, although you naturally need the cpu in determining what the content on screen should be. That's not the bottleneck in most cases: processing and determining the content doesn't take so much cpu power.

Simplying the issue, one can say that the amount of pixels you can push on screen per second is fixed. The more pixels each frame has, the less frames per second you can do. If the device would be 480x320 resolution, it would be a lot faster in many cases.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

If you'd like to reform the entire scientific publishing establishment, be my guest. Or perhaps you could code a PDF reflower. Please note that it must reflow scanned articles as well; just because a paper was from the 1960s, doesn't meant that it's useless!

Sadly, the screen is the easier thing to fix IMHO.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Please quantify. I certainly agree that, in principle, more pixels => slower. However, how much slower is the question.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

800x480 = 384000 Pixels
1024x600 = 614400 Pixels
1280x720 = 972800 Pixels.

By jumping from the current screen size to 1024x600 you almost double the amount of pixels per screen refresh. If you jump to 1280 it is almost 3 times the amount of pixels. This would mean the processor/graphics system would have to handle a LOT more data per-refresh.

Nathan

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

And what is it capable of? What lag would we be discussing? I'm well familiar with how to caculate the number of pixels; 1024x600 is (approximately) 4 and a half times the number of pixels in 480x281. That doesn't tell us how much faster 480x281 is than 1024x600.

Give me actual performance information. What is the n900 capable of pushing at what rate? Benchmarks on the various devices would be nice too.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

FWIW, TI says OMAP3430 supports up to 1024x768. (http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtb...emplateId=6123)

I'd presume that it should work "fine" (for whatever they determine to be "fine") at that resolution.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Well, a Nokiite sez that the OMAP3430 doesn't have the memory <-> GPU bandwidth for 1024x768, so the idea is pretty dead for the n900 (which is true anyway). Perhaps not for later versions, however.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Two things along about this. Just because the device "supports" it; doesn't mean it supports it well. I've seen a lot of graphics cards in my 20 years say they "support" x; but really they support x / 2 well.

Second, Since this is a embedded OpenGL/es device also; their is no probably way the /es portion would probably support 1024x768 at any decent frame rate. In fact I personally hope the OpenGL/es device can handle the current resolution at a good frame rate.

Nathan.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

I fail to see how adding more pixels will help anyone reading a PDF. Adding more pixels and increasing the display size sure will, but we'll be moving out of phone territory then.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Personally, I wish it had HDMI output on the thing and allowed at least a higher resolution for that. It could have been really useful for presentations via a projector, monitor, HDTV, etc.

In fact, it could have asked you if you want "TV Out" or "PC Mode" when plugging in the HDMI cable. PC Mode being a full lightweight window manager with mouse cursor etc, like a desktop PC. It could support bluetooth keyboard and mouse or even switch the touchscreen into touchpad mode so it could work without any extra peripherals at all.

Apart from the lack of a HDMI port and perhaps not enough space on root, I suspect the hardware would be perfectly capable of this comfortably including 720p video playback as there have already been confirmation that it downscales 720p to 800x480 without any problems. (granted, that does not prove the GPU can push 1280x720 at 60fps)

I think its only a matter of time before we have this in our pockets. There are already UMPCs that can do this, but they are so expensive. But I totally expect ARM to be able to handle this too, its just nobody is vying for that market yet.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

But but but your eee PC has a lower DPI! :eek: Last time I looked at that model it was around 150, so that shouldn't be possible.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

It's possible because it's true. I don't know much about your theory of DPI -> Smudginess/clarity for reading PDFs, but it doesn't seem to hold up to my empirical observation.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Because it gives more pixels/glyph, thereby decreasing the smudginess. I've given data points. Please bring concrete facts to the table too.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Are you bringing any? I don't see smudginess comparison table... ;)

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Well, DPI is exactly what you call "pixels/glyph", thus: less DPI on your eeePC -> less pixels/glyph -> more smudginess than your N810. If you think otherwise then we don't share the same definition of smudginess I think.

Or there's some extra stuff we're not considering, like better font rendering.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

There is extra stuff you are not considering, the eyesight of the user.

What is smudgy to one person can be clarity to another. It all depends how well you personally can resolve the resolution on the screen and naturally gets easier the larger the display size.

I do love high resolution small displays, as they have a paper-like quality due to the high DPI. However you still tend to have to zoom web sites a little even if they fit perfectly, for legibility.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

I have brought other facts (links to TI sites, etc.) but you're right. I could try to do a screenshot with a full-page render. I'll do so when I get a chance.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

No, DPI is "Dots Per Inch". DPG would be Dots Per Glyph, which is dependent upon font size and DPI, which is what I'm getting at. I'd like to render a full column of a two-column US Letter sized PDF, i.e. a US-based science article (here, physics).

Regardless, your allegation is false; I can clearly read a full column (as described above) on my eee 901 despite your protestations to the contrary.

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

Sure, except that there's a clear, resolution-dependent limit. For instance, try to render the letter "a" into one pixel.

I've looked at it closely, and it looks to me that there just aren't enough (but *almost* enough) pixels per glyph at a full page length (i.e. full column).

Re: Higher-res screen?
 

True, but it sounds like you are comparing a 10" 1024x600 screen to a 3.5" 800x480 one. Naturally, the former will look better but it would be pointless (not to mention insanely expensive) having a 3.5" 1024x600 screen. Sure it would render the font better, but to the human eye it would still look a blur.

My Xperia X1 had a 3" 800x480 screen and rendered pages with great detail, but I still found the smaller font sizes hard to read and ultimately sold it for the N900 hoping the extra .5" will help. The DPI was so high you could hardly tell the difference with anti-alising on or off, clearly your eye is starting to struggle to distinguish details at that point. A DPI any higher than that would go from hard to impossible and you cannot go much more than 4" in screen size before its too big to carry around in your day to day life.

Believe me, if it worked I would be all for it. But I found the iPod Touch far more usable for web browsing than my Xperia X1, purely because the DPI was just too high for such a small screen.