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View Full Version : Pocket PC-Club Reviews Toshiba e800


Jason Dunn
11-09-2003, 04:00 AM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pocketpc-club.nl/content.php?id=2084' target='_blank'>http://www.pocketpc-club.nl/content.php?id=2084</a><br /><br /></div>The article isn't in English, but the screen shots and pictures speak for themselves - the e800 benchmarks quite strongly, it has gobs of storage space, and it has that wondrous 640 x 480 screen. Can anyone translate the part about the screen resolution? What I'm curious about is how the device looks/runs in that mode - is the text utterly tiny? Can you use your Pocket PC at that resolution day to day? How do applications deal with the resolution? Questions, questions...

jpjehu
11-09-2003, 07:25 AM
the brighthand discussion forums have a number of different people writing in who own and have tested different things.

opus
11-09-2003, 07:27 AM
Rough translation of the part on the screen:

"This e800 has an enormous screen. To be precise, it has a diagonal of 10.16cm, which is noticably bigger in comparison with the 8.89cm of most Pocket PCs

"The screen has an nice clear white glow, and is very readable indoors. The screen also has very high quality, as you can see e.g. in the taskbar, where the color gradient is very smooth. With other Pocket PCs, the crossover is more visible.

"Outdoors the screen is less legible because of reflection. Also the icons are somewhat stretched out by the large screen, making the letters and images appear somewhat grainier. This is not major, but it is noticable.

"The screen is clearly readable with the backlight set at less than maximum. This spares precious battery life. A useful option for the backlight setting is "Enable auto control of screen light brightness by remaining battery power". By selecting this the backlight level will reduced if the battery is low on power."

Rough translation of the part on the high-resolution mode:

"A unique feature of the Toshiba e800 is the ability to switch to a screen resolution of 640x480. This requires a reset which occurs automatically when this option is selected from the Start menu.

"What one immediately notices is the very high quality of the screen and the extremely sharp display.

"The Westek Clearvue viewers are included, allowing you to view Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents in this high resolution. In other words, the standard applications of Windows Mobile 2003 are inaccessible. This is because this version of the OS doesn't yet support these resolutions.

"In theory there will be more applications in the future that can be used in this resultion, hopefully with a version of Pocket Internet Explorer as the highest priority. You will notice that this [resolution] takes a lot of processor power, and thus the opening and viewing of some documents can take a while."

-- Opus

kabkbak
11-09-2003, 06:32 PM
try http://www.freetranslation.com they have a 90%
translation here just paste the url :wink:

Janak Parekh
11-09-2003, 07:38 PM
translation here just paste the url :wink:
Of course, opus knows Dutch, so that helps. ;)

It appears that the built-in resolution switcher hides access to other Pocket PC programs, but the community has worked around this so that you can switch to the high-resolution and use it with WM2003.

--janak

Jonathon Watkins
11-09-2003, 07:41 PM
You will notice that this [resolution] takes a lot of processor power, and thus the opening and viewing of some documents can take a while.

Hmmmm, :? don't like the sound of that. We are just getting nice snappy usable PPCs and now VGA may take it away. Being on the 600Mhz+ new processors! Bump up the price. :|

opus
11-09-2003, 11:14 PM
try http://www.freetranslation.com they have a 90%
translation here just paste the url :wink:

I gave it a try and found the results ... interesting :roll:. My guess is that most will prefer my translation; check it out though...

-- Opus

opus
11-09-2003, 11:17 PM
You will notice that this [resolution] takes a lot of processor power, and thus the opening and viewing of some documents can take a while.

Hmmmm, :? don't like the sound of that. We are just getting nice snappy usable PPCs and now VGA may take it away. Being on the 600Mhz+ new processors! Bump up the price. :|

Actually I think the solution is to soup up the video processors in the PPCs. That will also make them more suitable for gaming :D

-- Opus

Dermot81
11-10-2003, 02:19 AM
um...if you have to soft reset before changing resolution and it takes more processing power to run in high res, then what is the advantage of having this "vga" screen over a regular PPC with nyidot or jslandscape?

Janak Parekh
11-10-2003, 04:11 AM
um...if you have to soft reset before changing resolution and it takes more processing power to run in high res, then what is the advantage of having this "vga" screen over a regular PPC with nyidot or jslandscape?
Because Nyditot/JSLandscape won't make the display actually push 640x480 pixels if it's not capable of it.

--janak

jizmo
11-10-2003, 09:42 AM
"The Westek Clearvue viewers are included, allowing you to view Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents in this high resolution. In other words, the standard applications of Windows Mobile 2003 are inaccessible. This is because this version of the OS doesn't yet support these resolutions.

..and yet Nyditot is capable of doing this in a way that all the PPC2003 elements are scaled correctly to bigger resolution, and graphical elements are smaller, due to 'higher' resolution. 8O

It really should've been possible, hopefully some 3rd party developer will come up with the hack to force everything to higher resolution.

/jizmo

dazz
11-10-2003, 02:12 PM
The real point here is that out of the box the higher resolution is not very useful and there is a fair bit of a premium to get it.

I have seen an e800 and as mentioned you have to do a soft reset to use the higher res. The high res will only work with ClearVue apps so most people would only use this to just show off the screen.

Pretty expensive toy just to do that.

I'll wait this MW can handle this for all programs.

Darren

Fishie
11-10-2003, 03:01 PM
The real point here is that out of the box the higher resolution is not very useful and there is a fair bit of a premium to get it.

I have seen an e800 and as mentioned you have to do a soft reset to use the higher res. The high res will only work with ClearVue apps so most people would only use this to just show off the screen.

Pretty expensive toy just to do that.

I'll wait this MW can handle this for all programs.

Darren

You CAN do it for most programs, just change some settings, native support for those resolutions is only tested with a few of those programes like the Westek suite so officialy only those support it.
You can use it on Pocket IE and most other programes in Windows Mobile 2k3 witouth any problems tough.

dazz
11-10-2003, 03:06 PM
I was speaking with a Toshiba rep last week and he said it will ONLY work with the Westek apps. Was he wrong?

Darren

DaleReeck
11-10-2003, 04:44 PM
From what I understand, ClearView, PocketIE and Microsoft Reader are the only "native" VGA apps.

While I applaud Toshiba for trying to do something different, VGA on PocketPC's isn't ready for prime time. There are too many gotchas to make the e800 anything but a novelty. When Microsoft releases a native VGA OS and software vendors start supporting the resolution, then VGA PocketPC's wil be worth it. Right now, I suspect Toshiba's implementation of VGA is going to be like their initial implementations of SDIO - their best guess that will untimately be a wrong guess of what the final standard will be.

Janak Parekh
11-10-2003, 04:45 PM
I was speaking with a Toshiba rep last week and he said it will ONLY work with the Westek apps. Was he wrong?
Sort of. The operating system handles it fine, but the bundled resolution switcher hides every app except for the ClearVue packages because regular WM2003 applets don't officially support 480x640. However, there are various workarounds to get into the "regular" WM2003 environment while in 480x640, and it appears a number of the applications work fine, although I'd suspect the print is a bit small in some of them.

--janak

Janak Parekh
11-10-2003, 04:46 PM
It really should've been possible, hopefully some 3rd party developer will come up with the hack to force everything to higher resolution.
I'm 99% sure Nyditot will release tools that support the higher-res display and switching to it while keeping the WM2003 apps accessible.

--janak

Scott R
11-10-2003, 08:54 PM
Someone on Brighthand wrote a little eVB app that allows you to run any app in high-res. I don't think it supports landscape, though. According to another user, the current version of Nyditot caused his e805 to lock-up, so you may want to avoid that for now.

Scott

sdemirel
11-10-2003, 10:29 PM
I think current PPC licence preventing Toshiba to implement VGA Operating System

Because in reality what Toshiba did in this device is to prevent users from running apps in VGA mode Built in Resolution switcher has many tricks in it to prevent any application to run in VGA . They even disable app buttons in VGA mode

But when u bypass Toshiba switcher 99% of apps working just fine (even some games)

So I thinks e805's VGA uncertainity is a legal issue rather then technical issue