Daniel Smith posted a “first-impression” review here that’s worth quoting on its own:
Got mine too yesterday - regarding the screen - it is fantastically high res, but one thing IMO lets it down a little (I’d liek to know if other people have noticed this.. :O)
I think it’s the layer that does the touch-sensitivity, it looks as though it’s adding some sort of odd polarisation or moire pattern over the screen - in simple terms this means that as you tilt the screen, you get an apparent ‘grain’ of rainbow-colours - particularly in bright/white areas. It has the overall effect of making photos look like they’re a lower resolution that the fantastic 800×480 screen underneath…
Don’t get me wrong - I’m making a total idiot of myself in the office acting like a kid-at-christmas now that it’s arrived (I was hitting refresh on the DHL page every 15mins for most of the day!!), and the screen is still awesome, but this point does let it down a little - what do other people think?
I did notice similar effects : high resolution pictures showing ‘jagged edges’ along straight lines, and today I also saw the strange overlay pattern. As far as the pictures are concerned, I have a suspicion this may have to do with the “conversion” effects when the device transforms say a 2000 x 1500 picture to display on a 800 x 480 screen : some kind of aliasing effect. Indeed, “native resolution” pictures (taken at 800 x 480) seem to be displayed perfectly…To be further analysed.Having said this, I remain very impressed with the sharpness of displayed text! This device is perfect to read e-books or other textual information.
Comment by Dominique Bonte 11.09.05 @ 3:07 amI’m guessing with near certainty that the touchscreen is resistive and that you’re seeing the touchscreen layers themselves. If this is the case then Nokia should have taken advantage of the fact that the SAW (surface acoustic wave) touchscreen technology patents have all expired and that this superior touchscreen solution should have been used instead of resistive. The resistive method involves obscuring about 15% of the display’s transmissiveness whereas the SAW method does not obscure the display at all.
The problem you raise with scaling of images is an unfortunate effect of the fact that static graphic images are presumed, incorrectly, by virtually all application developers as the only way to generate graphic user interfaces. What the developers should be doing instead is generating their GUIs directly from the data without the use of static graphics except for tiling images. If they had the toolkits for the job it would take them virtually no time at all to adapt their apps to any resolution and they would be able to avoid the ugliness of rescaling images between different aspect ratios.
Comment by Gene Mosher 11.09.05 @ 8:08 pm