Guest Paul [MVP] Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 Fed up with being jealous of your friend's Sharp GX-20 with it's 240 x 320 screen? Then be jealous no more! :( Microsoft have today announced at the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) that both Smartphones and Pocket PCs are to support higher screen resolutions. Pocket PC support is boosted from 240x320 to 480x640, and Smartphone is boosted from 176x220 to 240x320 - yep, that's right, Smartphones will soon have the resolution of EXISTING Pocket PCs! This is GREAT for the Smartphone, and could potentially mean any existing PPC app could be easily ported to the Smartphone screen size... just imagine that! :) Cheers to Robert Levy at SmartphoneThoughts for the heads up... P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Arisme Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 bad news for my pockets :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest [email protected] Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 This is just amazing, the one flaw with the OS, now rectified. The Sharp Gx20 made me sway a little but now I'm back on the side of MS Smartphone. (I wouldn't have gotten the Gx20 since the screen is ALL that is has, even though it is superp.) Paul: Will this be native support in WM2003 or is it an update? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest [email protected] Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 Got any good links on this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Paul [MVP] Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 Native support in 2k3 I *believe*... No good links about yet, since it's brand new information ;-) P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest muff Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 I'm actually of mixed minds on this announcement one of the design criteria for Smartpone platform was the screen size if this is now variable it means that games have to be planned to allow for this, and you can't rely on the aspect ratio even this also means that you have to allow for this in the speed of the game/app as well so much for a static platform to design for :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest www.msmobiles.com Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 Hello Microsoft Smartphone fans! I am also Pocket PC fan... "]This is GREAT for the Smartphone, and could potentially mean any existing PPC app could be easily ported to the Smartphone screen size... just imagine that! Yes, but it is MUCH GREATER for Pocket PC. Increase of resolution for Smartphone will not change much, but in Pocket PC world it is revolution. I attach here picture that shows, proportionally, the change: ... where you can see - not so big change for smartphone but big change for Pocket PC. As far as porting is concerned: well, that's not THAT easy - most Pocket PC applications rely on stylus usage (pointer device), and in smartphone they would be unusable unless smartphone would support some kind of cursor that would be moving around the screen.... ... anyway: this is truly a great news for Microsoft mobile devices. One of biggest such news since introduction of Windows Mobile 2003. :) :( :D :lol: :lol: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest [email protected] Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 So the new resolutions are times two for Smartphone and times four for PPC. Still very good news for Smartphone! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Simon Desser Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 I agree with Muff :cry: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest nytehawk2002 Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 Ok.. I'm puzzled... If the platform isn't changing hardware, do we know if the current screen will support that res? Maybe I'm wrong here but I'm thinking about a laptop, it doesn't matter what the OS supports. It's based on the Hardware (Ie the Vid Card and the TFT display). This is great news for the future of smartphones, however I see this as bad for the current size of the display. I'm not an old guy by any means but sometimes I have trouble reading websites now the way it is. And to increase the res on the same size screen, things need to become smaller. Just my .02$ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest martin Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 This is great news for photo's and movies etc.. :) I'll have to think about that bigger proccessor now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest awarner [MVP] Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 Have to wait now for screen shots etc. the ideas good but will it work well for developers :? muff you got your work cut out now :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest midnight Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 it does make development very complex, cos there will be high and low res phones on the market, will be even more trouble for us game developers also, just because the screen size isnt increased but the resolition is, does not mean that normal phone text size will be any smaller, it means it can go smaller sure, but what the real benefit is, is clarity of the image. Cleartype will look extremely smooth making everything so much nicer and easier to look at. but as for games, this is complex, scaling the screen up wont work, cos the graphics will look ugly, so, this means games have to have 2 different versions, a nightmare for both the graphic artist and the coder (this is for 2d games, 3d games wont matter so much), only real solution is to redraw all the graphics, and make new maps etc for the levels, which = double the development time. If the resolution had been doubled..... 352 x 440, then this would not have been a problem, cos scaling to exactly double size means that the games will look pretty much identical on both 176 x 220 and 352 x 440 devices. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest midnight Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 actually, just thought about this, and the only way ms could pull this off is if it works like a normal pc, switcheable resolutions, this means that all current apps/games will work as normal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Monolithix [MVP] Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 Ok.. I'm puzzled... If the platform isn't changing hardware, do we know if the current screen will support that res? Â Maybe I'm wrong here but I'm thinking about a laptop, it doesn't matter what the OS supports. Â It's based on the Hardware (Ie the Vid Card and the TFT display). Â This is great news for the future of smartphones, however I see this as bad for the current size of the display. Â I'm not an old guy by any means but sometimes I have trouble reading websites now the way it is. Â Â And to increase the res on the same size screen, things need to become smaller. Â Â Â Just my .02$ This would not affect ANY current Smartphones or PPC's currently on the market. However new devices could be fitted with a higher resolution screen. Please bear in mind this doesnt necassarily mean the screen will be physically larger. Personally i think it's a good thing. If PC games can get around it, surely starting a game in "low res", with an option for "high res", isn't all that difficult on a handheld device? The aspect ratio isn't ~that~ different... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Soyale Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 As ever, great to see active discussion of the Windows Mobile platform in the MoDaCo forums. The support for high resolution screens and portrait landscape screens was announced to developers at PDC as part of the future Windows Mobile roadmap. From a backward compatibility point of view there are a few things that developers should be aware of. The platform itself is going to try to help developers as much as possible. For example, in a high res scenario, where there is a logical screen multiplier the platform will, for example, pixel double so that your application looks "right" on the new screen. As Midnight points out, applications which make heavy use of graphics, such as games, will need to work on their graphical assets and code to use the right ones for the resolution. This is a new scenario for Smartphone developers but not a new scenario in general. Developers can use GetSystemMetrics to determine screen size and resolution and hence choose the most appropriate graphics set. In the case of Smartphone QVGA support was announced for the future Windows Mobile platform. The platform will detect non-QVGA apps and will run them with borders, a little like letterboxing a movie. This means you don't HAVE to do anything to update your app. However, as a developer you can start to make your apps resolution aware for Smartphone and both resolution and orientation aware for Pocket PC. HTH jp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest The PocketTV Team Posted October 29, 2003 Report Share Posted October 29, 2003 What API should you use to tell the OS that your app is aware of resolutions other than the standard one ? Is that defined already ? Should applications be able to support dynamical display resizing, like on the nex XP running on tablet PC's ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest The PocketTV Team Posted October 29, 2003 Report Share Posted October 29, 2003 it does make development very complex, cos there will be high and low res phones on the market, will be even more trouble for us game developers. I don't think you have to worry about that, unless you want to take advantage of the higher resolutions. If your game was developped for the lower resolution, it will work automatically with the new devices. Most likely, pixel scaling will be done by the hardware video processor, the the game performances will not be impacted. Now, if you want to take advantage of higher resolutions, you will have to make graphics at the new resolutions, and since you will have more pixels to move around, the performances may be lower unless the new devices have much faster processors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ppcsurfr Posted October 29, 2003 Report Share Posted October 29, 2003 If the resolution had been doubled..... 352 x 440, then this would not have been a problem, cos scaling to exactly double size means that the games will look pretty much identical on both 176 x 220 and 352 x 440 devices. Or did you mean quadrupled? Mabuhay! ~ Carlo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest midnight Posted October 29, 2003 Report Share Posted October 29, 2003 well, double the number of horizontal pixels & double the number of vertical pixels is what i meant, so you can scale everything perfectly without any distortion whatsoever, scaling from 176 x 220 to 240 x 320 will distort, and thats the point i was trying to make Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest spacemonkey Posted October 29, 2003 Report Share Posted October 29, 2003 Assuming Soyale is someone who would know, this sounds interesting... scaling on LCDs where the res isn't straight 2 times or something generally looks a bit nasty (although they could do some crazy CLearType style scaling... maybe) but this seems to be saying backwards compatability will be handled by letterboxing the app... this will look a bit ohrrible in my opinion. This whole situation is however not too unexpected, and really all us smartphone dev'rs have had it lucky so far that we've been able to write code with an assumption of screen size. It does however mean that most 2k2 code will have to be revisited to make it look nice on future devices. In the case of Smartphone QVGA support was announced for the future Windows Mobile platform. Â The platform will detect non-QVGA apps and will run them with borders, a little like letterboxing a movie. Â This means you don't HAVE to do anything to update your app. Â However, as a developer you can start to make your apps resolution aware for Smartphone and both resolution and orientation aware for Pocket PC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Soyale Posted October 30, 2003 Report Share Posted October 30, 2003 What API should you use to tell the OS that your app is aware of resolutions other than the standard one ? Is that defined already ?What's the scenario you're thinking about here? Should applications be able to support dynamical display resizing, like on the next XP running on tablet PC's ? You should definitely support orientation changes (Portrait to Landscape and vice versa). We've announced specific resolutions so your application should aim to handle those. HTH jp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Soyale Posted October 30, 2003 Report Share Posted October 30, 2003 Assuming Soyale is someone who would know, this sounds interesting... scaling on LCDs where the res isn't straight 2 times or something generally looks a bit nasty (although they could do some crazy CLearType style scaling... maybe) but this seems to be saying backwards compatibility will be handled by letterboxing the app... this will look a bit ohrrible in my opinion. As you point out there isn't a direct scaling multiplier between 176x220 and 240x320 so scaling would look horrible. Letterboxing was perhaps the wrong phrase to use, better would have been adding borders. This way the app that does not support the new resolution looks as it always did but with borders around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest The PocketTV Team Posted October 30, 2003 Report Share Posted October 30, 2003 > What's the scenario you're thinking about here? I mean, since many Smartphone apps do not really look at the display size and assume that it is 240x176, I would think that only apps that signal that they are aware of other resolution could run in an environment when the display size is non standard. If not, then I think many applications will just break if you run them with a different display size. What is the scenario that YOU envision ? Do you think that apps will just be launched in an environment where the display size is different from the standard ? If you do that, I bet you that half of the games and other apps wil break. We know for a fact that *many* Pocket PC apps assume that the display is 320x240, so it will be the same mess on Smartphone. Even something as basic as the paswword-protection dialog from MSFT breaks when running in Landscape mode on a Pocket PC! Our applications is correctly written and it looks at the display size, it can run well in landscape modes, etc, but that's not the general case. Many dialogs are hard-coded assuming certain display resolution, and minumum width or height of the display. For example a dialog that assumes that the screen is at least 240 pel height will break in Landscape mode if the height of the display becomes only 176. Too bad MSFT didn't make it clear from the beginning that Smartphone and Pocket PCs screen size could be different from the standard size. > You should definitely support orientation changes (Portrait to Landscape and vice versa). How are applications notified of an orientation change ? What message do they receive ? > We've announced specific resolutions so your application should aim to handle those. Can you please recap the resolutions that must be supported in Landscape or Portrait orientation for both Pocket PC and Smartphone ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest midnight Posted October 30, 2003 Report Share Posted October 30, 2003 hmmm, been thinking about this, is it definitely 240 x 320? and not 240 x 300? the reason i say this is because not only is this a change in scale, it is also a change in aspect ratio, which will cause even more problems regarding compatability Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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