E61 Screen resolution — Nokia Eseries S60 3.0 phones (E50, E60, E62, E61, E61i, E70)

elp 09 May 2006, 12:38

Hi,

The E61 looks very much like the dream phone for me but there's a detail that keeps bothering me about it: why is the E61 screen, despite physically much larger, 50% smaller in terms of resolution than the E60 and E70 screens? Is there any reason for this odd property? Actually, i'm very surprised that nobody seems to have noticed and explained this oddity.

I might have missed the point here but it sounds a bit frustrating that a S60 device with a large screen is at last released only to find out that it only has half the display area of devices with "normal" small screens (i want a large screen in order to see more things on the screen, not to see things bigger)...

Also how are applications using custom controls (such as ProfiMail or Papyrus) going to appear on these devices? I imagine that if developped with the E61 in mind, they'll appear just fine on the E61 but will be unusable on the 2 others because of their much higher resolution but physically smaller screens. On the other side, if developped for the E60 and E70, they'll look nice on those but will look awful on the E61. Does that mean that developpers, on top of dealing with different screen resolutions and orientation, will now have to deal with different pixel sizes?

FRiC 11 May 2006, 00:09

3rd Edition devices can have different resolutions and screen orientations. Apps should be written to handle the differences. Looking at how much interest the E61 is gathering, I imagine many apps will handle its screen properly.

As for why the E61 has a lower screen resolution, it's probably just a "Nokia thing". Same reason why they use RS-MMC on E60. :icon13:

Rafe 11 May 2006, 02:54

S60 3RD Edition supports scalable UI which means software can be written to support various screen resolutions.

As for the E61 - it has lower pixel density. This isn't necessairly a bad thing. The other devices are very high density in pixels. The E61 is more like earlier s60 phones in terms of pixel density.

krisse 08 Jun 2006, 09:55

I think a couple of things might explain the lower pixel density on the E61:

-The E61 doesn't have a camera, so you're not very likely to need to handle photos or videos which are the major reason for having a high density screen.

-The E61 price is pretty low for what you're getting, so maybe they saved some production costs on the screen.

I agree it would have been nice to see a higher res screen on the E61, it would be especially useful for surfing the internet with, but I assume they'll include that on some follow-up device... the E62?