QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 - product management, features & assumptions

Ortwin Regel ortwin at gmail.com
Tue Jun 10 20:58:22 CEST 2008


Well said.

Ortwin

On 6/10/08, Stroller <linux.luser at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> On 9 Jun 2008, at 01:56, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
>> ... i am asked by product management to do
>> things that are just not possible in vga (to do sanely/fast).
>> ... in the end if product management want X they get X. and
>> if for X to happen we go QVGA, then so be it. you guys lose. i need
>> a very very
>> very strong argument against going to qvga - and that means product
>> management
>> need to drop a feature.
>
>
> On 10 Jun 2008, at 11:55, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
>> ... graphics is the most intensive thing your device is likely to
>> do in terms of
>> processing. if you want soft drop shadows, alpha blending (and
>> trust me -
>> everyone is drooling for it out there - the iphone is doing it
>> already) the
>> sheer memory bandwidth and cycles needed to do that stuff at a
>> smooth framerate
>> is astounding. sure - if your life is plain with still images/
>> content and
>> everything is plain solid rectangles, you don't. but i am being
>> shown designs
>> wanted that REQUIRE compositing - REQUIRE alpha blending and all
>> that snazz.
>> this is coming to me and i need a way to accommodate it in the long
>> run
>> ... cpu alone can't do it all - unless you really cut down the
>> workload. that means too
>> bad - no alpha" ...
>
>
> On 6 Jun 2008, at 08:45, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
>> ... if we want to play the "my specs are better than your specs"
>> game right now, we will lose.
>> ... if all you measure a device on is dpi and pixel
>> count, you are being silly. how it looks matters even more. dpi
>> helps there,
>> but so does compositing, translucency, smooth animation etc. in
>> fact these
>> probably have a much greater "buy me" effect. by far more. i'll put
>> money on
>> that bet actually (this is just speaking from having done eyecandy
>> for over a
>> decade - on linux, and having seen what it can do to attract
>> people). to make
>> things like compositing fast, smooth and nice, you must lower
>> resolution to do
>> it, or increase graphics power grunt. so given that graphicws grunt
>> is not
>> changing, cpu is not, the only 2 things that can change are screen
>> resolution
>> or the "eyecandy" has to remain toned down. so does vga buy you
>> more sales for
>> the average joe than a sexy bit of eyecandy at qvga? i'm leaning to
>> qvga +
>> eyecandy myself.
>
>
> Reading these posts of the last few days it has just occurred to me
> that it's not Carsten we should be beating up on here.
> Who the heck asked for translucency and flashy animations?
>
> Management seem to be asking for this "alpha" bleeding rubbish, and
> it seems to me that we users need to be telling management that we
> don't care a heck for it.
>
> Sure, I know the iPhone does this now, but that doesn't mean Openmoko
> has to do it. Do we really want Openmoko to be just another iPhone
> clone? I know we see a fair number of posts on here about the iPhone,
> but surely that's just a result of the current buzz - is UI animation
> really a *necessity* in the long-term (or medium-term) future of the
> mobile phone market?
>
> DISCLAIMER: I haven't used an iPhone, and I'm not terribly interested
> in it. I do use a Mac as my main desktop, but that's not for the
> animation, it's because I want something that "just works" when I sit
> down at my computer. All us Mac fans found Expose to be a *massive*
> UI improvement when it was released, but that's because virtual
> desktops have always been rubbish on a Mac - with so many windows on
> a single desktop *some* way of finding the bottom-most one was
> required. The other day I was talking to a Linux developer who turned
> off compiz on his desktop because it slowed down his productivity -
> you simply don't need Expose if you have virtual desktops (which
> admittedly are not suitable for my granny).
>
> It seems to me that, whilst the iPhone's animation may "wow" people,
> what really distinguishes the iPhone is the same attention to UI
> simplicity that Apple have always brought to their products. It does
> a FEW things amazingly well, and that's where it separates itself
> from the majority of phones on the market, none of which *quite* suit
> the mass-market of users. Most users don't want to understand the
> filesystem on their mobile phone, so Apple do away with it; Apple
> have made it spectacularly easy (so much so that one must include in
> the discussion the word "intuitive") to email a photo taken on the
> camera or grabbed from a webpage, but they make it impossible to
> email attachments under many other circumstances. The majority of
> users don't want to copy & paste text on their mobile phones, so
> Apple just got rid of it - other manufacturers "muddy up" the phones
> they aim at girls and little old ladies (excuse me) by including the
> ability to copy & paste; Apple have realised that only a minority of
> business-phone users want or need that.
>
> The Neo & Freerunner have both been "smartphones", and that's surely
> the interest that draws Linux users to this list. We want to be able
> to shell into our unix servers, read PDFs and so on. The idea of an
> open phone fires our imagination because we can integrate our
> contacts from our LDAP servers and our diary with an iCal server, we
> can do whatever the heck we want with Openmoko - we want to ADD
> features, not remove them.
>
> In the context of that, does animation and transparency matter? Heck
> no! We want a phone that displays text & icons on the screen, and as
> long as the phone does that quick enough, we don't want you wasting
> resources on trying to make the "experience" more flashy.
>
> There has been mention in these threads about the screen requirements
> of smaller phones. I can only conclude from this that FIC are
> planning to leverage their experience in building smartphone hardware
> in order to break into to the larger market of small "girlie" and
> "soccer mom" phones. Fine, but please don't do this at the expense of
> your smartphone market. Honestly, I don't see how you can do this
> well, without castrating your power-phone offerings.
>
> Parts of this conversation have focussed on making a "use case" for
> VGA screens, but please, FIC management, make a use case for
> transparency and flashy animations before having Carsten work on it.
> Whilst I was writing an Apple spam arrived here, promoting today's
> new iPhone announcement - I clicked on the link to iSteve's
> presentation. The "enterprise" take-up from Fortune 500 companies was
> surely impressive, but this leverage is because of Exchange-
> compatibility and all the features that OS X gives to the iPhone for
> free, not the flashy animations. This is where Openmoko can compete.
>
> I could write a lot, LOT more here,
>
> Stroller.
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