Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Pocket PC Screen Resolution
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 09:30 AM
There are some very interesting discussions going on in response to Andy's post, but I wanted to bring the issue of Pocket PC screen resolution front and center and have a discussion about it. One user comment seemed to be typical of most I've seen on this issue:
"There MUST NOT be a fixed screen size/orientation with the next PocketPC OS! Windows CE is written to handle any screen size, and with v4 handles on the fly screen size/orientation changes. Why remove such a large portion of Windows CE functionality for PocketPC users?"
It's not as simple as flipping a switch, having the resolution double and everything working as nicely as before. I know that Windows CE .Net supports different resolutions, including landscape mode, but unless I'm mistaken, it's not a truly resolution-independent OS. That's the real key: in a resolution independent OS, when you change the resolution, every other piece of the user interface will dynamically change as well. That's not what we have, so let's talk about what we do have.
The Reality
Let's say you double the Pocket PC resolution from 320x240 to 640x480 - you'd think that would be a very simple switch to make right? It might be, but unless you were to adjust the font size upwards, text at 640x480 would be too small for many people (just imagine the entire UI on your device with everything 50% smaller - text, icons, etc.). This pain would exist on a pure Windows CE .Net device as well - you can bet that any OEM deploying Windows CE .Net devices will lock down the resolution or perhaps pick one alternative resolution and do the work to make it look good.
Have you ever tried to adjust the system font size on a Pocket PC using a registry hacker, either up or down? It's just as nasty as it is on the desktop - dialogue boxes and menus get ugly (overflowing/underflowing text), and the UI simply breaks. It's no longer a good user experience. I loved having a smaller text size for cramming more info on the screen at once, but I cringed every time a dialogue box (say, an appointment) popped up - it was so ugly! It's not something I'd want to show other people as an example of what the Pocket PC OS looks like. Now throw multi-lingual support in there - did you know any dialogue box written in German requires about 30% more text? And what about landscape mode? That's a whole new set of factors.
And let's think about performance for a second. At 320x240 the OS is tossing around 76,800 pixels. At 640x480 that number quadruples to 307,200 pixels. I already seen too much sluggishness with screen redraws right now - and you want to take the same hardware and try to hurl 400% more pixels down the pipe? Let's say the next generation of hardware with the Intel PXA255 is up to the task for 2D tasks - what about games? How many engines can dish up 300% more pixels and still give acceptable performance? Remember these developers put a lot of work into having a great user experience at 320x240.
The Real Issue
The real root problem is that Microsoft didn't create the Pocket PC OS (or Windows XP for that matter) to be truly resolution independent - most of it is hard-coded for a fixed resolution (or several resolutions). On the desktop you can go into advanced display settings to adjust the screen DPI upwards to make everything bigger, but we don't have that option on a Pocket PC. It helps on those 15" screen laptops that are native at 1600 x 1200 resolution, but it's an ugly kludge that defeats the purpose of running at the higher resolution.
Platform unification is critical to getting developers on board - just ask any developer who's trying to code J2ME games how frustrating it is that every phone has a different resolution. It's very difficult to get the same experience across multiple resolutions - you need a lot of overhead code to compensate for all the variables. Microsoft cares more about the platform than any single piece - which is the same reason why they haven't created an "XScale version" of their OS.
Where We Go From Here
The bottom line is that Microsoft wants to see this happen - we heard this from several people during the MVP Summit. They don't like seeing Sony devices trump the Pocket PC in resolution any more than we do, but they need to do a lot of work to make it happen in the right way. And that takes time...more time than most of us are willing to wait for, but I'd much rather see Microsoft do this from a low level and have it work the way it should.
"There MUST NOT be a fixed screen size/orientation with the next PocketPC OS! Windows CE is written to handle any screen size, and with v4 handles on the fly screen size/orientation changes. Why remove such a large portion of Windows CE functionality for PocketPC users?"
It's not as simple as flipping a switch, having the resolution double and everything working as nicely as before. I know that Windows CE .Net supports different resolutions, including landscape mode, but unless I'm mistaken, it's not a truly resolution-independent OS. That's the real key: in a resolution independent OS, when you change the resolution, every other piece of the user interface will dynamically change as well. That's not what we have, so let's talk about what we do have.
The Reality
Let's say you double the Pocket PC resolution from 320x240 to 640x480 - you'd think that would be a very simple switch to make right? It might be, but unless you were to adjust the font size upwards, text at 640x480 would be too small for many people (just imagine the entire UI on your device with everything 50% smaller - text, icons, etc.). This pain would exist on a pure Windows CE .Net device as well - you can bet that any OEM deploying Windows CE .Net devices will lock down the resolution or perhaps pick one alternative resolution and do the work to make it look good.
Have you ever tried to adjust the system font size on a Pocket PC using a registry hacker, either up or down? It's just as nasty as it is on the desktop - dialogue boxes and menus get ugly (overflowing/underflowing text), and the UI simply breaks. It's no longer a good user experience. I loved having a smaller text size for cramming more info on the screen at once, but I cringed every time a dialogue box (say, an appointment) popped up - it was so ugly! It's not something I'd want to show other people as an example of what the Pocket PC OS looks like. Now throw multi-lingual support in there - did you know any dialogue box written in German requires about 30% more text? And what about landscape mode? That's a whole new set of factors.
And let's think about performance for a second. At 320x240 the OS is tossing around 76,800 pixels. At 640x480 that number quadruples to 307,200 pixels. I already seen too much sluggishness with screen redraws right now - and you want to take the same hardware and try to hurl 400% more pixels down the pipe? Let's say the next generation of hardware with the Intel PXA255 is up to the task for 2D tasks - what about games? How many engines can dish up 300% more pixels and still give acceptable performance? Remember these developers put a lot of work into having a great user experience at 320x240.
The Real Issue
The real root problem is that Microsoft didn't create the Pocket PC OS (or Windows XP for that matter) to be truly resolution independent - most of it is hard-coded for a fixed resolution (or several resolutions). On the desktop you can go into advanced display settings to adjust the screen DPI upwards to make everything bigger, but we don't have that option on a Pocket PC. It helps on those 15" screen laptops that are native at 1600 x 1200 resolution, but it's an ugly kludge that defeats the purpose of running at the higher resolution.
Platform unification is critical to getting developers on board - just ask any developer who's trying to code J2ME games how frustrating it is that every phone has a different resolution. It's very difficult to get the same experience across multiple resolutions - you need a lot of overhead code to compensate for all the variables. Microsoft cares more about the platform than any single piece - which is the same reason why they haven't created an "XScale version" of their OS.
Where We Go From Here
The bottom line is that Microsoft wants to see this happen - we heard this from several people during the MVP Summit. They don't like seeing Sony devices trump the Pocket PC in resolution any more than we do, but they need to do a lot of work to make it happen in the right way. And that takes time...more time than most of us are willing to wait for, but I'd much rather see Microsoft do this from a low level and have it work the way it should.
