High resolution displays?

[1ns4nity]

Anyone here knows when PPCs will start getting higher resolution displays like the Tungsten T3? I think it makes quite a difference if you use your pda for reading ebooks & stuff.

[Anthony Caruana]

Well, the Toshiba E800 series can do 480 by 640. There is a planned update to Pocket PC shceduled for this year that will, in all likelihood, support VGA res and landscape mode.

[1ns4nity]

Well, the Toshiba E800 series can do 480 by 640. There is a planned update to Pocket PC shceduled for this year that will, in all likelihood, support VGA res and landscape mode.

When would that be?

[Anthony Caruana]

When I spoke to one of the Microsoft product managers last week he suggested that it would be ready mid year. However, i'm not sure when the OEMs will be ready to distribute it (if they are to distribute it)

[Kowalski]

do you think that this is necessery? im OK with 320x240 resolution.this makes our devices more the complex so consume more power and be more bigger

[Janak Parekh]

do you think that this is necessery?
Is color necessary? Is multitasking necessary? If it was down to "necessary", old B&W Palms might do.

im OK with 320x240 resolution.this makes our devices more the complex so consume more power and be more bigger
Not necessarily. If we can cram a 250dpi LCD on a Pocket PC, a 3.5" or 3.8" LCD might be able to show 480x640 pixels. Before you say "that will be too small", it wouldn't be if the fonts and UI controls were scaled up. You'd see the same image, just many times sharper.

And as for power consumption, presumably there's an incremental cost, but nothing like the jump to color in the first place. My e805 presumably draws a bit more power, but its life is not that different from other Pocket PCs. I'd say that WiFi is a much bigger drain.

--janak