The sadly flawed Symbian world top-end line-up - looking to the N8

slitchfield wrote:In this feature, I've been taking a long hard look at the top-end smartphones in the Symbian powered world over the last three years, pointing out their flaws and frailties, and - where appropriate - pointing out what should have been done to fix things up. Yes, Symbian has been cracking along with record momentum in the mid-tier, with Nokia trouncing the iPhones, Blackberries and Android phones in terms of raw unit sales, but Symbian's partners have been scoring rather a lot of own goals in recent times. And what of the 2010 Symbian^3 crop, such as the imminent Nokia N8 - will these suffer a similar fate? I'm optimistic...

Read on in the full article.

Great article Steve, as always balanced 😊

kevmc wrote:Great article Steve, as always balanced 😊

You mean biased? Marketing man...

Bought the Satio in November '10. After 2 SW's updates, & it was still not perfect. Bought N97 Mini in Dec. '10 & the phone hung on me a couple of times. Bought the Vivaz in April this year. This is by far the best S60 v5 phone I have ever used. I have sold the Satio & N97 Mini & I have passed the Vivaz to my son. Basically the S60 v5 is short on many fronts when you compare to other OS. IMHO, Symbian OS v3 based on keypad phone works better than v5 touchscreen phone. I think they just modified the v3 into a v5 to make it work on a touchscreen phone starting with the N5800. Hopefully this is where the Symbian 3 comes in to rectify matters. I have used the iphone 3GS before & my latest phone is the Nexus N1 with the latest 2.2 Froyo software which I bought 2 weeks ago.
The N1 is not a perfect phone or should I say the Android OS is not perfect. Even with 1 GHz possessor on board the screen's responsiveness & fluidity are not as good as the 3GS let alone the iphone 4. Management of email accounts & Facebook are much better in the iphone. Last but not least being an open source OS it is just too dependent on 3rd party apps. Yes, as mentioned that nearly 70% of Android apps are free. Then again most of these free apps are the "Lite" version. To go for a "Pro" or "Full" version you have to pay. There is no such thing as "free" lunch here.
I am just waiting for the N8 to be launched & I shall be getting one. Deep down inside me I am still very much a Symbian user & guess what? My 1st smart phone was a Nokia Symbian phone & I can't even remember the model & that was at least 7 years ago. Cheers mate!!

Am loyal Nokia owner and have 3 x E72, 1 E90, 6 x E71, etc. Basic problem with Nokia is they have become too bureaucratic and arrogant. Thier pace of change is too slow...And they are too slow to introduce new products, at the high level. Look at Samsung, HTC and even MOTOROLA, their come back is incredible.

The whole world is using 1GHZ processors and 512MB RAM and as usual Nokia is penny pinching...
with 256MB RAM and an ARM 680 processor. Ditto with the screen resolution. People compare and not stupid. It's preferable to charge 25-30� more (these components cost MUCH LESS) and give people the BEST...

I am sick and tired of getting "out of memory" errors on my E72's.

These guys are deservedly losing market share and OPK and Anssi are living in dream world....

I don't think "jazzing up" Symbian or Symbian 3 or 4 matter too much, just get your hardware act together and keep giving people value for money. The rest will come automatically.

I don't want to change from Symbian, it works fine for me, but I do want better specified phones...

junchao8 wrote:It's not a design flaw in case ur wondering. Even Symbian 3 still have 640x360 screen res limitation. Beside, its first Nokia with OLED screen over 3 inches, its a perfectly average screen - fine its outdoor quality isn't going to match Super-AMOLED, nor is the res 960x640 - but be thankful cos it could been worse, Nok could have reused N97's resistive LCD for all you know. There is nothing wrong.

junchao8 wrote:If u want high res, get a iPhone... twice the resolution of N8 on the same sized screen - but that is bad for the eyes in the long run.

clonmult wrote:No you can't. The devices that were seen around did have a larger screen, around 4", but the text was just as crisp on them, suggesting that they were actually higher resolution.

Please don't count rumour mongering and guess work as facts. I can't believe that gsmarena actually have specs of the device on their site.

It definitely has only a resolution of 640 horizontally. Look the video at this site at 3:21. I loaded the TechnoBuffalo site on my E90 (800 horizontally) and could see the page from "HOME" button to the "Search" button, in the video you can only see from the "HOME" button to the "ABOUT US" button.

Well, one of the main advantages for the new higher-res screens on the iPhone and the large 4+ inch screens on the Android phones (Samsung Galaxy S, Motorola Droid X, HTC Evo) is the new competition in the ebook and emagazine market. 4.3 inches is just shy of a small paperback page, so a higher res screen is perfect for casual reading. It's not so much fun on 640x320 screens.

Then again, as Barnes and Nobles' Nook platform, Borders and Kindle don't have apps on the Symbian platform, as they do for Android and iPhone (and even Blackberry) Nokia doesn't compete or have a presence in this market segment.

One reason the screen resolution is the same might be for app compatibility reasons. As a developer, it gives me more confidence that the app will look and work fine. After all, given the dozens of Nokia models, a developer can't be expected to test on every one of them. Its expensive and for many coders who are coding for fun and giving away apps for free its not an option at all.

That is one reason the iPhone also kept the same resolution for 3 generations and when they did upscale it, they kept the same aspect ratio and upscaled the previous apps.

Qt simulator is currently nowhere close to being a good enough replacement on-device testing, so not increasing the number of resolutions I need to test an app for is good.

Oh and agree about Nokia scoring "own goals" for the past few years 😊
Lets see how N8 does. A lot is riding on the N8 for Nokia.

"Nokia, has not produced a single Symbian handset with OMAP 3, and there is probably a reason N8 isn't using it (apart from battery concerns). If there is a serious and such apparent problem, why have Nokia not solved it? and more worryingly why has it chose to continue on with N8 on ARM 11? I for one think it lies with Symbian OS."

- Now that is a failed argument, it is simply not true. Symbian OS is definitely NOT limited to use one particular CPU type like the ARM 11. You just need to look at the Sony Ericsson Vivaz - it has an ARM Cortex A8 @ 720 Mhz and a SGX graphics chip. Actually, the Vivaz uses an OMAP chipset, soooee....

The reason for Nokia to use the chipset that they have in the 5800, N97, X6 etc. is propably cost. There is NO software technical reason for it - at all.

Regarding the N8 - the chipset in the N8 is vastly more powerful, even though the CPU core is an ARM 11. The bus transfer rates are much faster and the chipset also has the Broadcom BCM2727 graphics chip, which is faster than the SGX in the OMAP chipsets. Just look around on the net and checkout the benchmarks. It also beats the crap out the 1 GHz SnapDragon chipsets - by a WIDE margin!

>The resolution of the iPhone 4 is in fact just 480x360, dimensions are calculated in Points (1 >Point=2 Pixel), a "real" 960x640 resolution wouldn't make sense on a 3.5" display. The high >physical resolution is not used to display more information (as on the iPad), but to get a better >sharpness.

I thought long and hard about what on earth you're trying to say.

Well yes the iphone 4 has a 960x640 resolution to keep compatibility with third party apps that use bitmaps/custom menus designed for 480x360 that have not been fully upgraded to take advantage of the new display.

But even 3rd party apps that haven't been retrofited, if they use the iphone api menu calls for stuff like too bars/menu bars ... etc, benefit from 960x640 as the text is drawn 960x640 instead 480x360.

>Regarding the N8 - the chipset in the N8 is vastly more powerful, even though the CPU core is an >ARM 11. The bus transfer rates are much faster and the chipset also has the Broadcom BCM2727 >graphics chip, which is faster than the SGX in the OMAP chipsets. Just look around on the net and >checkout the benchmarks. It also beats the crap out the 1 GHz SnapDragon chipsets - by a WIDE >margin!

The fastest graphics core actually in Samsung's own SOC thats used in the Galaxy S and Wave because it has a SGX540.

The SnapDragon's gfx core isn't that fast.

Hope we do get the N8 soon as its dragging on abit,Eldar on mobile-review.com did mention the ram on the N8 an hope we do not get memory full an delete items on the N8,Steve ought to Apply for a Job at Nokia ,so he can really show them what sort of mobile he would like the design an release at Nokia,as we do want to see better Mobile produced at Nokia,Why? as it been a really bad year up till now at Nokia,as we used to get Mobiles nearly every month but its Samsung who are doing this an really outshining Nokia,an hope after the N8 we do see a change at Nokia,

People talking about about the "poor" hardware of the N8 should analyse the specs sheets before.

Here the facts.

The N8 uses an ARM 11 at 680 MHZ (typical frequency around 800 MHZ).
The N8 uses a Broadcom GPU (BCM2727).
The N8 screen resolution is 640*360
The N8 camera sensor+optic are the best ever put on a smartphone.

Now let's look at the choices:

Let's start with the CPU. Symbian handle processes like no other OS on mobile hardware. Multi tasks is a core functionality of this OS and a more powerful hardware is not needed to do it well. Plus a simpler chip design means less power needed with recent silicon burning technologies. Warning, I'm talking about low level stuff, not user interface and apps. You're right, how a CPU 50% faster than the one on the n97 is going to allow me to have smooth kinetic scrolling while I am listening to music??? (people with a 5800 or a n97 know that kinetic scrolling is rendered at 5 FPS in this case, 100% of CPU is used). The answer lies within the GPU, a BCM2727 chip.

The BCM2727 chip is really powerful. Just take a look at this PDF file: http://www.curiouscat.org/Steve/Media/2727-PB01-R.pdf
Some interesting points about this chip. First it does everything. It encodes and decodes audio, video, jpeg on it's own and is capable of displaying 32 millions of triangles! All these tasks that relied on the CPU for Symbian^1 devices can now be done by the Broadcom GPU with SYmbian^3 (thank to the new graphic architecture). So what will the CPU have to do then ? Handling threads, sending instructions and other core OS functionalities. A domain where Symbian is really good.
But that's not all. Look at the memory. The BCM2727 had 32 MB of SDRAM built-in! Now that's REALLY interesting. Why? Because the GPU doesn't pollute the Ram with textures for example, it does it with its local memory. Access times are also lower. Also very interesting, the GPU and the CPU can READ/WRITE at the same time(two memories, two memory controllers)! I doubt this is possible with the single chip design of the TI OMAP, but I may be wrong. What if it needs more than 32MB of memory? I guess it can still use the ram, although it will be slower.
And last but not least, it is frugal in terms of power consumption. Once again, look at the number in the PDF. 60 hours of music playback, 3 hours of video capture. Remember the two days of music playback announced by Nokia ? That's where it comes from.
So yeah, the Broadcom BCM2727 is a vey powerful chip and not so power angry at the same time, great for audio, 3D games, photos and videos. And he is working with great partners.

These partners are of course the new Carl Zeiss optics and the "super" sensor of the N8 camera. They are so good that Nokia almost disable all kind of digital processing (look at Damian Dinning articles). And the few digital processes is done by the Broadcom chip? I guess that's why the N8 camera is lightning fast!

Finally the screen resolution. Yeah it is not the biggest of this year... But let's take a look at the advantages. First keeping this resolution makes it easier to run s60 v5 applications on Symbian^3. Maybe more interesting, the ratio between 720p and nHD resolution is exactly 4. It means that 4 pixels of the video = 1 pixel on the N8 screen. Very easy to handle, znd it is very easy to upscale the N8 screen resolution to 720p. You know, when you plug the device to a HD TV via HDMI...

So here a summary:

The N8 is a very well balanced device, with frugal chips, a CPU good enough to not limit the GPU, and this GPU is versatile and also quite powerful. Since Symbian^3 is hardware accelerated, the ARM11@680mhz is a good choice. When it comes to video/photo shooting, the great sensor+optics make the work of the GPU easier, making the N8 fast for this use cases.

Thanks for reading.

P.S: This is purely based on hardware specifications, of course the software has to be good but I don't worry, it seems to be the case for the N8.

@rafiii

Well nobody complained about the GPU (its a good one) and the HW accelerated UI will also help quite a lot.

However, one important thing thats still going to suck is Javascript and web browsing performance. Nokia's own web browser isnt very fast to begin with and when given a CPU slower than the competiting phones, Android's or iphone's fast web browsers with much faster CPUs are going to just destroy the N8 in web browsing speeds.

Further, WRT performance is also likely going to be very slow since WRT are basically just web apps on steroids mostly. WRT apps are not native apps, they are interpreted. Have you used any WRT apps on a current Nokia S60v5 phone? They are SLOW and there is nothing much an app developer can do about it except rewriting it as a native app.

Finally, whether games will be CPU limited or whether the CPU is good enough remains to be seen. Games can often benifit from NEON instructions present on the Cortex A8 but not on the ARM11 so it might turn out to be quite limiting.

In any case, we should probably wait for final reviews though I am not very optimistic about the CPU performance.

For the people claiming that "ARM11 is more battery efficient than Cortex A8" , well it depends quite a lot upon the implementation. The newer phones like the Droid X, iPhone 4 and probably the Galaxy S all are using 45nm based Cortex A8 or variants, and they should be nearly as power efficient as 65nm ARM11 while giving far more performance.

I do think that its very likely that the chip inside the N8 is a 65nm ARM11 chip as Nokia seem to very conservative on that front, which is a very bad idea in todays aggressive environment.

Choosing a good GPU does not excuse the poor choice of a CPU.

@rahulgarg, Cortex in the iphone 3gs vs the ARM11 in iphone 3g. Built on the same process. The Cortex consumes more power than the ARM11 when in use. However it process faster and allows it to back to idle earlier. Due to this, the Cortex actually less power overall than ARM11.

@rafii

iphone have had 2D acceleration since inception so ScreenPlay in Symbian^3 is only catching up now 3 years later.

... What SOC doesn't hardware decode audio/video. And if you look, the BMC2727 doesn't have baseband and gps cores built in unlike Snapdragon.

Broadcom's SOC does have stacked ram. But its only that. Packaged in to save costs and not for performance reasons like the x360 edram for example.

While its nice to have a fast GPU, u also need a fast FPU to pair it with. The ARM11's optional FPU is not so hot compared to unit(with new NEON instruction set too) built into Cortex A8s.

The super sensor in the N8 isn't so super when compared to backside illuminated sensor used in the iphone 4. Larger yes but only due to more megapixels but not as sensitive as Omnivision part Apple uses.

Yes N8 uses nHD to keep compatibility but the problem is Android and Iphone have higher resolutions and also manage to keep apps compatible because they were designed that way from the start. Besides symbian^1 have the lowest amount of available apps so keeping compatibility doesn't make sense anyway.

Regarding the Satio, which is the phone I use, the other flaws you didn't mention are the lack of internal memory and the infernal proprietary headphone/charging/connection port. However; I opted for the Satio as I wanted to stay with Symbian at least, if not Nokia (the N97 was a no), having previously used the N95, and wanted a phone with great photography capabilities; this I'm glad to say I'm still very happy with. Since owning the phone I've also found that the Play Now app store is utterly pathetic (in Australia at least?) and would now love to have access to Ovi, this is talked about elsewhere on here.

If the N8 had been available at the time (December 09) or promised for shortly thereafter I would definitely have gone for it and would probably be a happier camper for a long time. More's the pity it wasn't and is still some way off it seems. I fear that although in terms of the hardware attributes it may at last be (just about) the touchscreen smartphone perfected (or 'Done Right' if you like), it will be at least six months too late and may appear, if not oudated as such, probably 'old hat'. If it had been available in Q1 or 2 of this year I think it would have dominated this sector, trounced the opposition and made the iPhone 4 look rather sad. As it is I think many people will skip it and wait to see what Santa brings us in 2011.

Unregistered wrote: Yes, I know Android 2.2 can do it as well, only problem is, if I upgrade the Nexus to 2.2, half of the apps do not work anymore. Now that is utter crap!

No, man. I'll stick with Symbian, and specifically I am looking forward to the N8!

What apps are you running? I have had no problems with any of my apps after upgrading to 2.2. From what I've seen, Android developers are pretty good at pushing out updates to fix unexpected incompatibilities.

I used several Nokia phones (N95, N85, N97, and the N900), switched to a Nexus One in January, and haven't looked back. As an investor in Nokia, I want N8 to be a hit, but I'm definitely taking a "prove it to me" attitude.

@rahulgarg
Yeah I totally agree with you in term of web performance the N8 is going to have a ahrd time against the other smartphones. At least we can expect better performance than s60 v5 but certainly not iphone4 level.
I have a 5800 so I know how slow the WRT apps can be 😉 I don't even talk about flash content, that's just a joke on such CPU

My only hope here is that the hardware acceleration will help, but I know it won't do miracles. However from what I saw on the video from KomorkomaniaBlog, it seems more than acceptable.

Power management is the real mystery. We'll see, although I'm not so worried for multimedia use.

@unregistered
Agreed, ARM11 FPU is not very sexy compared to NEON, but will it be enough to keep the GPU afloat? We'll see.

About the sensors:
You're right, a pixel of the iPhone4 is a bit more sensitive than a pixel of the N8 (at least in theory). But the iphone4 can't capture light that wasn't there at first. The Xenon flash is going to make a huge difference compared to the iphone4 LED. And even without flash, the N8 capture more photon since le sensor is bigger. So I don't know, but it looks like the N8 wins this one.

Unregistered wrote:@rahulgarg, Cortex in the iphone 3gs vs the ARM11 in iphone 3g. Built on the same process. The Cortex consumes more power than the ARM11 when in use. However it process faster and allows it to back to idle earlier. Due to this, the Cortex actually less power overall than ARM11.

@rafii

iphone have had 2D acceleration since inception so ScreenPlay in Symbian^3 is only catching up now 3 years later.

... What SOC doesn't hardware decode audio/video. And if you look, the BMC2727 doesn't have baseband and gps cores built in unlike Snapdragon.

Broadcom's SOC does have stacked ram. But its only that. Packaged in to save costs and not for performance reasons like the x360 edram for example.

While its nice to have a fast GPU, u also need a fast FPU to pair it with. The ARM11's optional FPU is not so hot compared to unit(with new NEON instruction set too) built into Cortex A8s.

The super sensor in the N8 isn't so super when compared to backside illuminated sensor used in the iphone 4. Larger yes but only due to more megapixels but not as sensitive as Omnivision part Apple uses.

Yes N8 uses nHD to keep compatibility but the problem is Android and Iphone have higher resolutions and also manage to keep apps compatible because they were designed that way from the start. Besides symbian^1 have the lowest amount of available apps so keeping compatibility doesn't make sense anyway.

In no particular order ....
1. Number of apps. So what if there are so many tens/hundreds/thousands of apps for a device - that shouldn't really be a deciding factor.
2. I'd be willing to bet that larger sensor size, with a well designed lens, and a decent flash will give the N8 an advantage of the backlit sensor in the iPhone 4.
3. How often is a FPU used in day to day operations? Probably not that much. The GPU is arguably more usable.
4. N95 - that had 3D accelerated video before the iPhone. Okay, Nokia dropped the GPU (stupid!), but they're definitely way past having caught up.

As an example of the CPU/GPU blend - I'm running an ION based netbook at home. Despite only having a lowly N270 CPU, due to a decent GPU, it can actually handle 3D gaming quite well. Much better than dual core machines with integrated graphics.

But as none of us here have actually used the N8 (or at least none can say that they've used it), and its not quite ready for release, all of this is just irritiating/idle speculation.

I really am getting a feeling that Nokia have basically got it right with the N8. Eldars "review" was of a very early variant, and doesn't count. Everything else I've seen of it makes it sound very interesting.

And the fact that I can hook it up to a HD TV, connect up a bluetooth mouse, and use a PHONE (!!!!) as a media center if I were so inclined is qutie intriguing.

There's a lot of crap being written about needing high res screens. I have an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 3G and apart from looking nice I have found no practical benefit to the high res screen on the 4 with such a small display. Just another stupid spec numbers race to catch gullible consumers without a capacity for reasoned thought. Pointless pissing contests are for suckers.

Unregistered wrote:There's a lot of crap being written about needing high res screens. I have an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 3G and apart from looking nice I have found no practical benefit to the high res screen on the 4 with such a small display. Just another stupid spec numbers race to catch gullible consumers without a capacity for reasoned thought. Pointless pissing contests are for suckers.

No practical benefit?

Try using Google Maps or any GPS application that draws a map, the additional resolution means you can read more detail (like street names, etc) even when zoomed further out.

Another example? Try using a remote desktop client to access your home or office PC. 800 pixels makes all the difference.

Another? Avoid sideways scrolling and constant zooming in/out on websites that aren't optimised for mobiles.

800+ is the new standard, Nokia are (once again) well behind the curve.

Of the older devices, Steve flagged 5 with firmware problems.

It's that the one big question we have for the N8 folk? As in: for how long will you be supporting the phone?

I've been reading the memory comments by Rafe.

The lack of ram have nothing to do with symbian. Nor is it hardware. Its only a problem on chipsets/socs that Nokia choose to use.

So the question becomes why did Nokia decide to source parts from those vendors.

Unregistered wrote:No practical benefit?

Try using Google Maps or any GPS application that draws a map, the additional resolution means you can read more detail (like street names, etc) even when zoomed further out.

Another example? Try using a remote desktop client to access your home or office PC. 800 pixels makes all the difference.

Another? Avoid sideways scrolling and constant zooming in/out on websites that aren't optimised for mobiles.

800+ is the new standard, Nokia are (once again) well behind the curve.

On a 4" + screen, I can see that being possible. But even if the higher resolution makes it possible to read tiny text on a 3,5" screen, it doesn't make the text actually bigger or comfortable to read. It's ruinous for the eyes to concentrate on text that small (6pt or less), especially on a backlit screen!

Sure, it'd be nice if everything was all high res, all the time. A 1080p resolution screen in our pockets. But the very marginal benefits just aren't worth much of the effort and price this would command. If you read text that tiny on a regular basis, you'd better just bring along a magnifier, because you'll be having eye strain issues before long. The rest of us, we'll use a zoom feature.

guizzy wrote:On a 4" + screen, I can see that being possible. But even if the higher resolution makes it possible to read tiny text on a 3,5" screen, it doesn't make the text actually bigger or comfortable to read. It's ruinous for the eyes to concentrate on text that small (6pt or less), especially on a backlit screen!

Sure, it'd be nice if everything was all high res, all the time. A 1080p resolution screen in our pockets. But the very marginal benefits just aren't worth much of the effort and price this would command. If you read text that tiny on a regular basis, you'd better just bring along a magnifier, because you'll be having eye strain issues before long. The rest of us, we'll use a zoom feature.

+1

I've got a regular laptop with a 15" 1280x800 screen. Also a netbook with an 11.6" 1366x768 screen - higher resolution, much smaller. My eyesight is quite good, and using the standard windows fonts makes for damnably small text. Although it does do a damn good job with 720p video ....

Aye, most people will use zoom, much easier than having to squint at your phone/satnav device whilst its perched on the dashboard.

Unregistered wrote:>The resolution of the iPhone 4 is in fact just 480x360, dimensions are calculated in Points (1 >Point=2 Pixel), a "real" 960x640 resolution wouldn't make sense on a 3.5" display. The high >physical resolution is not used to display more information (as on the iPad), but to get a better >sharpness.

I thought long and hard about what on earth you're trying to say.

Well yes the iphone 4 has a 960x640 resolution to keep compatibility with third party apps that use bitmaps/custom menus designed for 480x360 that have not been fully upgraded to take advantage of the new display.

But even 3rd party apps that haven't been retrofited, if they use the iphone api menu calls for stuff like too bars/menu bars ... etc, benefit from 960x640 as the text is drawn 960x640 instead 480x360.

The iPhone screen prior to the iPhone 4 was actually 480x320. iPhone 4 doubles it exactly so that old apps just double up to run full screen. ie. 1 pixel at 480x320 is 4 pixels in a square on the iPhone 4.

However, since much of the artwork is vector artwork, not bitmaps, those scale up smoother than a rough x2 bitmap scaling would suggest. Fonts in particular scale up much smoother.

The upshot is that the EFFECTIVE size of elements of the display of the iPhone 4 is EXACTLY the same as the old model but much sharper. In the context of browsing a web page, the fonts are smoother but the JPEGs are doubled up (unless you supply 300dpi+ artwork using Webkit CSS media queries), otherwise you've got exactly the same web page rendering. You don't see any more of the page on the screen. It's still effectively a 480x320 viewport onto the page, not a 960x640 viewport.

See http://globalmoxie.com/blog/designing-for-iphone4-retina-display.shtml for an explanation.

On the N8 I don't think they scale content at all so you'll actually see MORE of a web page because the viewport is 640x360 at 1:1 pixel ratio instead of the iPhone's effective 480x320 view. You could of course zoom out on the iPhone if you can read the text still at half the actual size.

The usability of the web browser on each probably has more of a bearing on this than the screen resolution and there Apple are definitely winning. S60's browser needs some work.

Unregistered wrote:No practical benefit?

Try using Google Maps or any GPS application that draws a map, the additional resolution means you can read more detail (like street names, etc) even when zoomed further out.

Another example? Try using a remote desktop client to access your home or office PC. 800 pixels makes all the difference.

Another? Avoid sideways scrolling and constant zooming in/out on websites that aren't optimised for mobiles.

800+ is the new standard, Nokia are (once again) well behind the curve.

Nope. I've tried 1 and 3 on the iPhone 4 and small text is small text. It looks a bit nicer on the 4 but in practical terms it's no more usable. If that's the best you can offer then the prosecution rests. Spec numbers for ignorant mugs.

To Unregistered@3:50pm at 2 posts up.

You sad it way better than I did. And yes I goofed on the 480x360 part. But I blame RIM though as they do both 480x360 and 480x320. 😊

The resolution depends on the eyesight of the user. I can comfortably read 90% of pages on my n900 without horizontal scrolling or zooming thanks to the high resolution of the display. So for me nhd resolution would be a real step back. But Tim Salmon for example keeps saying he is not able to do the same comfortably. So for him it probably wouldn't matter very much.