I've been adding to and fleshing out my original Nokia N93 'TV out' showcase - see the revised 'Powerhouse in your pocket' feature. And, of course, everything mentioned in this piece will now also apply in equal measure to the upcoming N95 and other top-end future Nseries devices.
Read on in the full article.
In Pocket Gamer's piece about the Next Gen games, Nokia themselves mentioned the idea of using the games on a television through the TV Out, so that's the first thing to suggest that TV Out isn't just a one-off for camcorder phones like the N93.
Excellent! Now i can have two powerhouses in my pocket.😉
I wantittoo! TV out on a E61 would just about kick my desktop off the table. A question : Is the TV resolution the same as the phones? Or is it 640x480? Or can it be even more? The S60v3 browser for instance - I imagine the phone has to keep track of the whole screen for instance - for the minimap in any case, so, if the phone was connected to a TV/Monitor, it shouldnt be to hard giving it a higher resolution.
Other comment: Playing games is fine, but you are still stuck with a itsy bitsy keyboard for input. Even the bluetooth keyboard is not great - I keep hitting the menu button which is cleverly situated next to the arrow buttons (on the phone keyboard as well) no wonder the games are taking so long to come through. Now: HOW BOUT A BLUETOOTH GAMES CONTROLLER HUH NOKIA? A wireless/battery/rechargeable joystick/games controller that controls the game on your phone would go a long way towards getting the phones seen as serious contenders in the gaming industry.
Last comment - on the topic of games : there are some amazing games for the Nokias at Gameloft (Real Football, Midnight Pool, Princeof Persia) , but I have never seen them mentioned (or listed) at AAS?
Happy Christmas from the South!
Pieter
Johannesburg
Re: resolution. Images and videos are driven out at TV resolution (not sure on exact details, probably VGA), but all other apps are at 320 by 240, assuming your N93 is in landscape/laptop mode.
re: games. No, those are Java games and are utterly repulsivXXXXXXXXXXXX I mean resource-hungry and sloXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ..... err... OK, any volunteers to review some good Java games for S60? Anybody tried these titles and able to comment? I refuse to run most Java apps on principle - losing 10MB of RAM just to run a tiny app is just terrible.
Steve
"there are some amazing games for the Nokias at Gameloft"
They're pretty awful if you compare them with games written for Symbian. The latest Symbian phones are capable of PS2-level 3D graphics, Java games are generally a couple of generations behind that and usually 2D or faked 3D.
The problem is that few games developers have taken advantage of the Symbian hardware, which is why Nokia's launching a load of Symbian-based games in 2007 on their next gen games platform.