Re: Question about Dell Axim X51v screen resolution

This might get long winded. The number of actual pixels on an X51v is
640x480, while previous PPC were typically 320x240. If you were to display
an older 320x240 screen on an X51v without doing anything else, it would
take up only the top right 1/4 of the screen. Letters that were 1/16" high
would be 1/32" high. For most people that would result in illegible text,
and icons that are just too small to tap. To compensate for that, the
visual look of the screen is roughly the same as it was, but rendered with
twice as many pixels in both directions. An icon or character that was
rendered with 10x10 dots is now rendered with 20x20 dots but in the same
physical space. The clarity and sharpness is vastly improved. Given that you
have 20x20 dots to work with, you could render the character in 15x15 dots
and get 50% more stuff on the screen and still be clear, but small. You
actually can do the rendering in 10x10 and get the situation I started with,
everything being 1/4 the size it used to be (1/2 as big in each direction).
That is what the "VGA hacks do". It will allow you to have twice as many
rows and columns in a spread***, close to all of a web page, etc. but at a
size that many feel is just too small to see. Remember your screen didn't
get any bigger. Hold your PPC out at arms length. Now hold it twice as far
away.

There is the option to adjust the font size on a system wide basis to get
more or less information on the screen, but it doesn't let you get all the
way to "four times" as much.

Think about pictures and videos for a minute. What would four times as much
be? A picture or video filled the screen before, and now it still fills the
screen. Now it just does it with four times as many pixels, making it
sharper. Unfortunately in the case of pictures, if you have a 320x240
picture, it will show in a quarter of the screen, with most viewers. You
only have 320x240 dots in the file, it would have to fill in by replicating
each dot 4 times to fill the 640x480 screen. Larger pictures look better
because they are only having to be compressed to 640x480 to fit the screen
as opposed to 320x240. You would have the same sort of issue with the
videos, but the video coprocessor, unique to the X50v/X51v is designed to
scale up video to fit the screen, so all your 320x420 videos will play full
screen. Actually beneficial since a 640x480 video takes four times the
storage as the same one in 320x240.

So, yea, the view out of the box looks pretty much the same as far as what's
on the screen, but it looks a lot sharper. You have some control over text
size to get more use of the screen real estate. You can get software and
hacks to actually force it to display full VGA, but at the cost of
text/icon/etc size. Usability depends on the user.

--
Sven
MVP - Mobile Devices
<mdnightman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1149176443.475112.206340@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm considering buying the Dell Axim X51v PDA.

I read that even though the Axim X51v has VGA 640x480 screen
resolution, it doesn't give 4 times more screen space than QVGA one.
Does that mean, when you display pictures, or play videos, or surf web
the screen space is still limited to 320x240?

Thank you!



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