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Motorola's Rumored Android Phone Focuses on Screen Size
nottheusualsuspect excerpts from this speculation-laden report at Brighthand that "Motorola is reportedly working on a device that will have one of the largest displays of any smartphone. Code-named the Shadow, it will sport a 4.3-inch WVGA+ touchscreen, Google's Android OS, and a range of other high-end features. When it comes to screen size, the Shadow will be equaled only by the Windows Mobile-based HTC HD2. The closest Android-powered model will be the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, which will sport a 4.0-inch display. Most other models, like the Motorola Droid and Google Nexus One, have 3.7-inch screens. The display on this upcoming Motorola smartphone will allegedly have a resolution of 850 by 484 pixels."
This is rumor article about a rumored mobile device. This fascinates me and I'd love to know more. While I'm waiting I'll page through my Star magazine to see about Lindsey Lohan's latest escapades...
Well, I might be the son of god, who allegedly created the universe.
First, it's never a good sign when you measure your package using a decimal point, Slashdot. Second this article makes you look like a whore. You should be ashamed! What would your mother think if she saw you dressed in those fishnets, a stolen wonderbra, and humping an android? This is not the way to get in touch with your feminine side, young man. When you've put some decent clothes on, come back down and I'm taking you down to the hex shop and we're going to find you something to play with that won't hurt as much.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Seventeen other employees post about it on Slashdot.
Enough, already.
Sounds really odd that it will be 850x484. I believe it will have 854x480 instead, which makes a lot more sense.
Until someone shows me something with a keyboard, I am sticking with my BlackBerry.
The G1 was a good first attempt but everything since has been an iPhone wannabe, all shiny and pretty but missing that important item.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
That we will have to test against to make sure our apps work right. Android is starting to get as bad as WinMo. We ported our iPhone apps over to Android, but testing and QA is starting to rack up on the Android side of the house.
Love of hate Apple, their basic configuration is the same across the various iPhone/iPod Touch models. Make it work well on one, it works well on all 30M or so devices out there. Even Blackberry is basically 2 configs, classic and storm.
But Windows Mobile is a nightmare as just about every handset has a different UI and hardware spec. And Google seems to be heading down the same road.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Size doesn't matter!
It's only a matter of time before I can get my hands on a 65 inch mobile phone, with Blu-Ray, a media center, and digital cable.
...that's a tablet. Seriously, do they think cargo pockets are the predominant pocket variety?
Just what we need... a larger brick to carry around.
This is probably cheaper than buying an unlocked phone from some supplier...
Hey babah, pop quiz. Is that a phone in my pocket or did I just get penis enlargement surgery?
Does anybody keep a mental table of what these obscure abbreviations actually mean anymore? I can remember that VGA is 640x480 and SVGA is 800x600, after that the letters get meaningless and I've got to go . So why not just save the trouble and tell me the damned resolution from the beginning?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
and it still won't play back avi, divx, quicktime, wmv, or xvid.
Right now, the standard layman outfit of jeans/slacks + shirt provides limited options... keys + wallet + other junk already leave little space for more than a tiny cell phone as it is.
I'd bet some apparel company could make a killing, for example, if they made a real attempt to market cargo pants, with larger sized pockets for all the gee-whiz gadgets, to the Best Buy loving crowd.
The twin problems of huge display and interaction with said display have already been solved in the form of a projector + Johnny Chung Lee's graduate work. We're just waiting for the business to catch up with the engineering.
The real question is in the post title.
If you have enough software access and the hardware is complete enough (e.g. n900, maybe devmode droid & some jailbird iphones) you can get just about anything to run over bluetooth...not just headsets but full keyboards, mice, wiimotes, etc.
It might take some messy configuration to map the keys properly, but once thats done they would be 100% functional.
The physical size of the screen is irrelevant.
That is totally not the case. In mobile design you are working around very tight constraints around how many pixels wide a target like a button can be, because a finger can only hit a physical target so small (on the iPhone, it's 35 pixels although you can fudge downward a bit).
So when the physical screen size gets larger, that means you COULD design buttons smaller in pixel resolution to keep the same target size but allow more data to show. Otherwise your interface will end up looking goofy large on such a device - that might be OK, but if you are trying to make a really good application it's silly to ignore things like that. I mean, if no-one designs software to take advantage of this larger screen than what was the point of it all?
Hopefully the Android API has some way to get at PPI data in addition to screen resolution so the designer can design a flexible layout that allows for buttons and data to expand or contract as needed. I know the Android API very generally but not well enough to know if it has that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Does anybody keep a mental table of what these obscure abbreviations actually mean anymore? I can remember that VGA is 640x480 and SVGA is 800x600
The ones that start with 'W' are merely the wide versions of the originals, so generally you take the width of the next higher-up resolution and use that with the height of the one you're dealing with.
VGA = 640x480
WVGA = 800x480 (common for cellphones, but due to panel sizes, they're also coming out in 854x480)
SVGA = 800x600
WSVGA = 1024x600 (usually seen in netbooks)
XGA = 1024x768
Maybe it's just about the right time for the hefty, shoulder-carried piece of tech to come back in fashion. Anybody remember the boom-box?
Actually, the first thing that popped into my head was to imagine Sting singing "I want my big screen phone".
Start workin' out guys. Annoying, shoulder-carried big screen portable TV with a phone in it. Videophone your GF on the subway. Oh, this is Slashdot... nevermind.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I wonder about the downside of increasingly-larger displays. I very much in favor of large displays (in both pixels and physical dimension) for fixed equipment, but expect larger screens in portable devices to have robustness problems. My current phone is an aged HTC Dash with a mere 2.5 inch diagonal screen, but in a year and a half I've had to replace a cracked screen twice. The first breakage happened in a fight with my dog over possession of a tennis ball; the second was probably a non-FAA-sanctioned interaction with an airline seatbelt, but I was asleep at the time. The price of replacement screens on Ebay continues to drop, they work pretty well, and I'm getting experienced in doing the replacement, but it is an inconvenience. I hope these large display phones have adequate attention to screen protection -- without being two inches thick and 24 ounces.
Where did you get the idea that WVGA is common for cellphones? Only some of the most recent top end phones have WVGA.
Where did you get the idea that WVGA is common for cellphones? Only some of the most recent top end phones have WVGA.
Sorry, instead of 'common for cellphones', I should have said 'commonly found on cellphones'. Few other devices use that resolution, except MIDs and the like.
And if you lived in Asia, that resolution would seem pretty normal for a smartphone. :(
No, you need the name because the resolution alone, doesn't tell you important things like whether or not it uses hold-and-modify mode, extra-half-bright, planar pixels, or a Copper list to change registers mid-frame. A good, exciting video mode is too complicated to sum up with just a few numbers, so you need a name for it -- oh wait, what decade is this? Never mind.
I've been waiting for the right Android phone to replace my G1. The Verizon Droid is pretty close to what I've been hoping for, but it is for Verizon, not Tmobile. The Cliq is still too bulky, slow processor, etc. I love the form factor of the new MyTouch, but I've got to have hard keyboard, and again the processor is blah. If someone would just make a nice slim package with hard keys, a larger screen, and a great processor I would pay for it immediately. Android is a great mobile OS, we just haven't got the right package quite yet. So maybe this rumored unit will be the one?
WinMo never did run right on any of the dozens of devices I've tried it on. It crashed, it memory leaked, it lost connection to its devices every couple minutes. It has an oboard critical task sensor that would cause it to fail when the loss of the minimal utility the device offered would do the most damage. It lost data - lots of it. It sucked the life from endless batteries in record time and many thousands of minutes from my life that I would like back. Platform diversity was the least of its problems. Please don't talk about somebody else's QA and WinMo in the same post.
Windows Mobile killed the PDA. The PDA was a great idea and many of them were quite cool - except that once you put WinMo on them they were universally craptacular.
Oh, and while I'm here, yeah. This thing looks cool and all, but that iSlate rumor is looking pretty sweet too. It would be nice if the Goog came up with a webcam tablet thingy that used low power processors and wireless or 3G.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
im more interested in the screens they are developing that transmits the screen directly to your retina get the feeling once that gets out on the market no will give a damn how big your phones screen is lol
Yes, the Droid has a slide-out one that cant be used comfortably from any angle (I tried it). Its perfectly clear that the parent poster is talking about a phone with a proper keyboard on it, like a Nokia E71 or a Blackberry 8320.
The HTC Salsa seems to fit the bill nicely but wont be out for a while
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Posts like this are why I just could not condone stopping AC, ever.
Internet trolls can be sophisticated, well-written, erotic, provocative, and funny. They challenge social "norms", and make us re-evaluate them.
This is actually a nice troll, and yes, I am a woman. The ending is hilarious, but ruins the fun I was having before... but that's the whole point of the troll!!! I know, I'm stating the obvious but I just loved this one, and I have a right to! We're forgetting that, folks. He/she has a right to those fantasies, and I have a right to read them. I think lol.
Long live the AC to feed our dirty minds!
Thanks AC, Rachel x
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