There’s no doubt that, at this point anyway, Pocket PCs have the lead in VGA screen. However, the race is far from over. The Pocket PC’s implementation leaves much to be desired, so there’s plenty of room for the Palm OS to come out with a better implementation of VGA.
Still Room for the Palm OS to Take the Lead in VGA
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Right now, Palm have many more important things to worry about than the size of the screen.
The japanese market only CL-860 (and similar clamshell models) have very very nice 640×480 displays, I’m pretty sure they were ahead of everyone in the pda market in this respect.
Anybody that takes the time to download and check out a Cobalt (Palm OS 6) simulator can see for himself that VGA support in this upcoming OS is nothing but a quickly-hacked afterthought. Windows Mobile 2003 SE’s implementation seems very polished in comparison.
Conclusion: If Cobalt device eventually surface, don’t expect too much as far as VGA support.
VGA = 320 x 200 with 8bit color or 640 x 480 with 4bit color
What is he talking about?
>Windows Mobile 2003 SE’s implementation seems very polished in comparison.
You must be out of your mind, or you simply don’t have a clue of what you are talking about. The 2003SE version does NOT support VGA the right way. THAT’S why this editorial was written in the first place! It simply resizes the QVGA resolution to fill up the VGA number of pixels, showing the exact same amount of data as in the QVGA screens.
As we say in Greece: “Doro adoro”, meaning “a gift that’s a non-gift”.
> It simply resizes the QVGA resolution to fill up the VGA number of pixels, showing the exact same amount of data as in the QVGA screens.
Well if you had done your homework and tried Cobalt’s simulator, as I suggested, you’d know that’s exactly what Palm OS will do… 1-2 years later…
I have the palmOS simulator here. The number of pixels shown is pretty much the same no matter what mode you really try.
But when it comes to real devices, PalmOS does NOT have a problem scaling from 160×160 up to 320×320, up to 480×320 (like my PDA) and I am sure VGA PalmOS devices won’t be late to come.
The point of brighthand’s editorial was that PalmSource may implement VGA in a better way than Microsoft.
Current Palm OS Cobalt simulator don’t support this theory. VGA-support has exactly the same flaws.
That was the point I wanted to make.
If you are aware of useful functional differences in PalmSource’s implementation of VGA, I’d be glad to hear them, because they are not apparent in their documentation or simulator.
Is it just me, or is it ironic that Longhorn will allow proper scaling to higher-resolutions (with content size being independent of screen resolution), while people are complaining that Windows CE scales things properly, instead of changing content size with screen resolution?
The japanese market only CL-860 (and similar clamshell models) have very very nice 640×480 displays, I’m pretty sure they were ahead of everyone in the pda market in this respect.
True this.
Last year when I went to Japan, I realized that the PDA is not the only thing that the Japanese are way ahead of. Their technology is I’d say 100% better than US tech. Some of the stuff I’ve saw there is amazing.
Longhorn will have a different graphics engine. PocketPC’s Windows guts are the same as of Windows 98SE’s.
Besides, who wants to browse sites in QVGA independent of resolution? Except osnews and a couple of other sites, the rest look awful on low res devices.
This article seems to focus more on applications than on the resolution support of the underlying OS. My guess is that the situations on Cobalt and Windows Mobile are quite similar — they scale the application UI to fit the resolution, but allow applications which are aware of the resolution to take advantage of it. The problem with the kind of “true VGA” mode on PalmOS suggested by the article is that the many applications written for the classic 120×120 screen would take up only a tiny part of the screen. Since there’s no web browser included in the Cobalt simulator, it’s not yet possible to compare the main example used in the article (the Windows Mobile web browser.)
PocketPC is based on windows ce and therefore has nothing in common with either windows 9x or the windows nt line (nt, 2000, xp, etc)
PalmOS Cobalt supports VGA or any other resolution in both what you call the “right way” and the “wrong way”. An application can either let the system scale everything to the higher resolution and get better graphics (text in particular) and the same amount of data on screen, or, it can work at the native screen resolution and display more information. How it is done depends only on applications. Some well behaving application will be able to to take advantage of the extra screen space, some will need to be updated. An application can even mix both “ways” if it makes sense.
BTW, this has always been the case on PalmOS when the screen sizes went from 160 to 320, applications could choose to be rescaled (the default) or use the extra screen space to show more data. PalmOS has always handled a veriety of screen sizes better than PocketPC and way before PocketPC.
— mathias
I read this article the other day and although I agree Palm could definitely come ahead, and I also agree we can’t count on Palm One for this… sadly I don’t think we can count on Tapwave either. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Zodiac 2 to death, but at the same time Tapwave can hardly get games out for the device as it is. In fact they’ve recently decided to change focus rather than try to fix that. Regardless they’ve already announced they won’t have a new Zodiac or what not out until next year at the earliest.
I’ve been developing software for Windows handheld PCs in the industrial environment for over 3 years. They support standard resolutions. I’ve even got an old tablet pc that runs wince and has a native resolution of 800×600. It’s great for RDP, and internet.
Isn’t the Sharp Zaurus screen 65536 colours in 640 x 480?
These are really fine and fast machines. In our lab, we trialled a few of these with running a Multihop Ad-hoc network on Wireless LAN cards and also 3G cards…
Battery life is excellent and the displays are not only very colourful and high resolution but also the best I have ever seen in sunlight.
I have seen nothing to beat them yet!
The ‘classic’ palm OS res is 160×160.. not 120×120.. just a FYI
They’re talking specifically about the PocketPC branch of Windows CE for PDAs. Which as it stands maxes out at 640×480 and leaves itself pretty limited as to how it actually uses that space.
This is the stupidest thread I’ve read on OS NEWS. If Microsoft or Palm for that matter actually shrunk down the OS on a 640×480 screen (meaning shrinking the text rather than rendering it at a higher dpi) then elements of the OS would be difficult to read and interact with. Imagine OK buttons at 1/8″ on a 2.5″ screen at 640×480. Palm and Microsoft know better. Only super geeks want these giant 640×480 displays at 72 dpi. Personally I’d like a 640×480 display at 200 dpi, that way the text would be crisper and more like print quality.
Palm size devices have become feature junkies. If you want 1024×768 wireless-bluetounge-MP3 functionality bring your laptop along! My Palm III with 8megs lasts weeks without worrying about battery replacement. It has a simple, useable handwriting system and a backlight. Palm shouldn’t play the Pocket PC I-wanna-be-a-PC game. Palm should be in your hand – not on the recharge cradle after 3 hours of use!
You are not wrong in this statement. My new PDA (arriving Tuesday
, the high-end Dell x50v, only has 3 hours of battery life because of its ultra-fast CPU (624 Mhz), VGA screen and 3D accelerator that it features (yes, it has a 3D gfx card in it and it comes with 2 real 3D games). If you dim the screen and you throttle the CPU down to 206 Mhz, you still only going to get about 4 hours of battery.
My PalmV on the other hand, it can do about 7 hours, but the PDA can also do so little. Should a PDA only be a Personal Assistant for work stuff, or should it also do other things too having the advantage of the small form factor (e.g. play games, browse the internet, listen to music, watch full DVD movies, grab pictures/video etc)? Personally, I want to do all that with a single device. My lightest laptop (an old Sony Vaio 333 Mhz/128MB from 1999) it’s 1.2 kg (just below 3 lbs, an engineering miracle in its time) and it costed dearly back then, and new versions of it also do. On the other hand, you get similar functionality (gadget-wise, not software-wise) with a high-end PDA, for half the money (or less). So yeah, why not have VGA PDAs then?
My PalmV is great for some basic address book/notes device, but in year 2005, I want to be doing more.
My Zaurus SL6000 has a 480×640 screen. As it’s linux based, the full rez is used by most apps…and it definitely is handy for web access on the move (Opera does a pretty good job of most pages at that sort of resolution).
I’d want a Zarus for NetHack on the go…
damn those idiots you can easily get a program that allows you to get full benefits of VGA displays on pocket pc devices, the reson why they don’t ship windows mobile like that by default is it’s extremely difficult to click on some small objects, unless you would use a neadle that would scratch the display.
Eugenia, could you possiblely do a review on it? I’ve been debating about getting a Dell PDA for a while now, although since I have a PowerBook I’d have to fiddle around with Missing Sync. Anyway enjoy your new toy.
A good review is already available, at brighthand:
http://www.brighthand.com/article/Dell_Axim_X50v_Review
Also the Missing Sync for Palm os is extremely excellent. If the version for PocketPC is even half as good I’d heartily recommend it.