QVGA V/s VGA for GTA03 (was something about yummy CPU-GPU combos!)

[Chris Wright]

2008/6/10 The Rasterman Carsten Haitzler <raster at openmoko.org>:
> On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:40:08 +0100 Stroller <linux.luser at myrealbox.com> babbled:
>
>>
>> On 10 Jun 2008, at 02:17, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:
>> > browsing full web pages scrammed into a 2.8" screen as many have
>> > suggested, is
>> > really... pushing such a tiny screen far beyond its usefulness. web
>> > pages are
>> > "designed" for 14" or 17" screens or so. squeezing them down into
>> > 2.8" is nigh
>> > madness. it's possible - but vga vs qvga there isn't the factor
>> > (imho) :)
>>
>> I'm sorry, Carsten, but this just makes me think you're nuts. Um, I
>> mean, eccentric.
>>
>> I mean, I know you know loads more about this sort of thing than I
>> do, but mobile phone web-browsers are absolutely standard these days.
>
> never said otherwise but the screen is physically small. very. put it at a
> normal usage distance and it covers a small fraction of the field of view a
> standard desktop screen does. web pages are normally designed for the field of
> view of a desktop screen. either you play zooming games to squeeze it down, or
> scrolling, or play re-formatting games. however you look at it - you won't get
> close to the same experience.

True...someone mentioned a month view for a calendar with a meaningful
amount of content as a use case for a higher resolution screen, but on
a three-inch display, you're not getting any significant amount of
data across without a magnifying glass.

Using a terminal emulator would be far more pleasant with the higher
resolution screen, but you're not going to get an 80x25 window in
there; with a 640x480 display plus an on-screen keyboard, you're going
to have either an 80x30 or so window in portrait mode and an
unreadable font, or you're going to get about 80x15 in landscape.

Video's going to scale anyway (which says more about processor / gpu
issues than about acceptable quality). Really, viewing photos is the
only thing that will suffer significantly. This isn't as much of an
issue since the Freerunner doesn't have a camera. But the GTA04
probably will, and the QVGA might be somewhat annoying.

Since the alternative to using QVGA is using VGA with a faster GPU and
processor, and this is a phone that runs on batteries, I'm inclined to
encourage the use of QVGA on future Openmoko phones. I have a phone
from 2002 with a battery that used to last a week; it annoys me to
deal with much less than that.