Centralization of graphical awesomeness

Iain B. Findleton ifindleton at videotron.ca
Wed Oct 28 15:39:28 CET 2009


Ken Young wrote:
> DJDAS <djdas at djdas.net> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>   
>> I am sure people trying the smoothness and responsiveness of
>> Illume at 240x320 would never complain of a lower resolution!
>> Furthermore I don't understand why a lower resolution (and in this I
>> agree with you people are strange ;) ) would become in an unusable
>> device while the iPhone at the same resolution is the best usable device
>>     
> ;)
>
> OK, I was going to try to control myself, but I just can't.   I'm one of
> the people who always pops out of the woodwork to scream when someone
> suggests that switching to QVGA is a good idea.
>
> 1) The iPhone is not QVGA.   It's HVGA.   Try running a web browser on
> an iPhone with the bottom half of the display covered with black tape.
>
> 2) The Freerunner has one, and ONLY ONE, feature which is somewhat
> better than what is found on a typical smart phone.   The VGA display.
> You are suggesting that feature should be downgraded so that it is
> effectively worse than what is found virtually every smart phone being
> currently manufactured.   Every other feature of our phones is either
> no better than average (the GPS, the accelerometers), worse than
> average (USB 1.1, GPRS), or fucked up by firmware problems (WiFi).
> Yes, let's make sure the display is substandard too!
>
> Personally, I wish OM had stayed with the UI they had in 2007.1.  That's
> right, 2007.1 - the first version, which had no kinetic scrolling.
> There was never any chance that OM would produce a phone with graphics
> as smooth and fancy as what a high-volume smart phone has.   They did not
> have access to the hardware components.   They did not have a legion
> of engineers to work on it.    There is even less chance that gta02-core
> or gta03 will have state-of-the-art graphics capabilities.   It will
> be nothing short of a miracle if a community hardware effort ever
> produces a usable phone, available to the full OM community, at all.
> IMO the OM software should try to differentiate our device from
> other smart phones, not produce a half-assed iPhone clone.   Forget
> smooth graphics.   Forget kinetic scrolling.   Forget transparency.
> Show a simple, clean array of icons representing the applications
> which can be launched.   Allow the user to set the brightness, screen
> blank time and suspend time.   Stop there.
>
> Ken Young
>
>
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>   
Neo graphics is certainly not as wonderful as you can get with iPhone
like devices, but it is certainly far from a disaster. Only real problem
I have found is the rate at which images can be displayed, which appears
to be related more to SD card and memory access speed than anything
else. Still, its usable for looping through pictures. The VGA resolution
makes the device as far as I am concerned. Lots of space for a nice
application UI, good scrolling, scalable fonts, nice color handling.

I do think, however, that its never going to be more than an interesting
toy and test platform for ideas for mobile applications. To me, the most
interesting feature is it can be used as a portable office, as it can
hold quite a bit of data, connects to anything, and when forwarded to a
display with modern graphics capabilities, is quite fast and smooth on
many applications.

Instead of hauling about a portable, you can pop the Neo in your pocket,
and not worry about it.



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