5" 1080p screens becoming a reality just in time for P2?


I don't think that whatever Craig says amount to "decisions" yet. We haven't heard that ED is thinking about all this.

I mentioned that somewhere already, I'd prefer 1280x800 or (if that's not available) 720p.


More pixels don't make much sense, as no normal human eye can't see them on such a small size.


So yes, it would most probably need more power, more CPU power and wouldn't make sense because you can't see the difference.
 
I don't think that whatever Craig says amount to "decisions" yet. We haven't heard that ED is thinking about all this.

I mentioned that somewhere already, I'd prefer 1280x800 or (if that's not available) 720p.


More pixels don't make much sense, as no normal human eye can't see them on such a small size.


So yes, it would most probably need more power, more CPU power and wouldn't make sense because you can't see the difference.
Are you planning on actually getting samples of different screens (with different resolutions)? That would seem like the only sensible approach, at least to me. From my unrepresentative experience I would say it's probably fairly difficult to make accurate assumptions about either type of screen, but that's more a gut feeling and I might be wrong.
 
I don't think that whatever Craig says amount to "decisions" yet. We haven't heard that ED is thinking about all this.

I mentioned that somewhere already, I'd prefer 1280x800 or (if that's not available) 720p.


More pixels don't make much sense, as no normal human eye can't see them on such a small size.


So yes, it would most probably need more power, more CPU power and wouldn't make sense because you can't see the difference.

Glad to see a pragmatic view in the OP team :)
 
To me its about screen quality, not the pixels, i prefer the screen that makes the software look best.


This can be either the 720p or the 1080, whichever produces the best output.


Like with camera's, i prefer a quality lens over having a billion Megapixels.


Its rather senseless to store 300MB pictures that are all blurry as **** :)


General consumers seem to love it tho...
 
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I hope they don't put a user facing camera on the Pandora 2. I hope DSs and phones haven't made that common enough for them to feel like they have to include it. I'm afraid of those.
 
I've just received a Pandora, and I can't really complain about screen resolution.


I would, however be very interested in a physically bigger screen. accompanying this with a slightly higher resolution would make sense.
 
Yes, slightly higher resolution on a slightly bigger screen makes sense. Going from 4.3" 800x480 to 5" 1920x1080 doesn't make sense. I completely agree with ED here, 1280x800 or 1280x720 would be best. I could live with lower resolutions than that (e.g. 1024x600 would be good enough for me, and that fits nicely in the 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 series), but those don't seem to be available.
 
Just saw that Sharp are now producing 1920 x 1080 5" screens for Smartphones.


Here is the story about it in Engadget: http://www.engadget....d-panel-type-5/


I guess it looks like Craig was right, these look like they will become the norm. I guess we will see what they will be like on batteries, when some reviews are done for the products out/coming out with these screens. Then I guess we can comment - we should know very soon (if its not out already)
 
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Just saw that Sharp are now producing 1920 x 1080 5" screens for Smartphones.

Here is the story about it in Engadget: http://www.engadget....d-panel-type-5/


I guess it looks like Craig was right, these look like they will become the norm. I guess we will see what they will be like on batteries, when some reviews are done for the products out/coming out with these screens. Then I guess we can comment - we should know very soon (if its not out already)
you beat to it. I was just to post the link.

Send from my ZTE Warp
 
I'm hoping that the technology behind these insane hires screens will make 1280x800 5" screens cheaper and better. As well as the availability of low-power CPU/GPUs that can deal with those high resolutions. I really don't need that insane amount of ppi on the Pandora 2, but it would be nice if it had full HD hdmi output and enough horsepower to decode movies at that resolution. But the screen itself should be a tradeoff between availability, quality, power consumption, and price - not just the highest possible resolution. I don't want to pay for pixels I can't see, and I certainly don't want those nanopixels to affect my battery life or cpu/gpu performance, and make me have to reconfigure everything to use way bigger font sizes because otherwise I can't read anything.


Look at it this way: the current Pandora has 800x480 pixels, which is 0.384 megapixels. This resolution is actually fine for a 4.3" screen in my opinion. If we make the screen a bit larger (5" to 5.5"), the resolution should also increase a bit. Now 1280x800 is 1 megapixel, or 2.66 times as many pixels as the original Pandora resolution. If nothing else changes, this means it takes 2.66 times as much horsepower (cpu/gpu/memory/bandwidth) to render a frame at this resolution. So the rest of the hardware will need to be at least 2.66 times better just to stay at the current level of perceived performance. I can live with that, but it's more or less the upper limit of what I can live with. I would like to have some of the extra horsepower used to actually improve the perceived performance.


Now consider a 1920x1080 screen. This is 2.07 megapixels, or 5.4 times as many pixels as the original Pandora resolution. You see the problem?


This would all not be such a big problem if it was easy to put the display in an arbitrary lower resolution. But that's impossible with LCD: unless you use some integer fraction, it will look blurred. So what are the options for 1920x1080? You could double the pixels and get 960x540, which is a rather awkward resolution because most things are designed for 480 or 600 lines (or multiples of 240 or 200 in general). You could triple the pixels and get 640x360, which is lower res than the Pandora 1 and not enough for VGA. None of these downscaled resolutions are particularly useful, especially not for things like retro emulation.


In contrast, if we could have 1280x800, this nicely fits standard XGA (1024x768), WXGA (1280x768), and normal HD (1280x720); quadruple pixels gives exactly CGA (320x200); rotated you can fit two times SVGA (800x600) (no idea if that's useful, but you never know - dual monitor qemu?), etc. And most importantly: the native 1280x800 resolution would not be too high to use standard font/icon size/... settings (if you have good eyesight) without screen magnifier software/hardware.
 
Just saw that Sharp are now producing 1920 x 1080 5" screens for Smartphones.


Here is the story about it in Engadget: http://www.engadget....d-panel-type-5/


I guess it looks like Craig was right, these look like they will become the norm. I guess we will see what they will be like on batteries, when some reviews are done for the products out/coming out with these screens. Then I guess we can comment - we should know very soon (if its not out already)

The norm? I don't think so. There are a lot of laptops these days with full 1080p, but I wouldn't call it 'the norm' even in this product category.


I would be quiete surprised if the average res on phones would soon be bigger than the average consumer-laptop-res.


An even if it would be "the norm" one day, there is no reason to use such a resolution just because it is. They will cost more and they will requiere more calc power. It would be pretty top-notch if P2 would target the GC or Ps2 as emulateable, but there is no way it could be able to emulate HD-Consoles - that's why I would call using a 1080-screen a stupid decision. Let other companies play with impressive specs and let us act with reason!
 
I'm hoping that the technology behind these insane hires screens will make 1280x800 5" screens cheaper and better. As well as the availability of low-power CPU/GPUs that can deal with those high resolutions. I really don't need that insane amount of ppi on the Pandora 2, but it would be nice if it had full HD hdmi output and enough horsepower to decode movies at that resolution. But the screen itself should be a tradeoff between availability, quality, power consumption, and price - not just the highest possible resolution. I don't want to pay for pixels I can't see, and I certainly don't want those nanopixels to affect my battery life or cpu/gpu performance, and make me have to reconfigure everything to use way bigger font sizes because otherwise I can't read anything.

CPU load doesn't usually scale much with resolution unless you're stuck soft rendering the whole thing, so you don't really have to worry about that. Memory bandwidth should be both much higher - going from MDDR to at least LPDDR2 or DDR3 with clocks at least twice as high and two channels instead of one - and more accessible with improved SoC buses and better CPU latency hiding. Increased demands on space for framebuffer/backbuffer for 2D is absolutely piddly compared to the overall increase in RAM the device will have.


Hardware video decode for 1080p30 with normal h.264 profiles is standard even on pretty low end Chinese SoCs these days. I wouldn't worry about that one either. And mobile GPUs have gotten faster at a much quicker pace than even CPUs have. The 200MHz SGX530 on the 1GHz Pandoras is very weak compared to what even an OMAP5 will have (2x SGX543MP2 @ 500MHz or so afaik), which will probably not be especially high end compared to what other SoCs are offering. We're talking 2-8 times more power per core per clock, 2.5x more clock speed, and 2x more cores, for 10-40x more power. Of course, 3D doesn't need to use the full resolution, and it doesn't really look as bad with non-integer scaling. Especially if you can get a high quality filter on it.


So I don't think driving 1080p content will necessarily be a huge challenge, which is good, because regardless of whether or not it has a 1080p screen it IS nice to be able to put 1080p content out over HDMI.

This would all not be such a big problem if it was easy to put the display in an arbitrary lower resolution. But that's impossible with LCD: unless you use some integer fraction, it will look blurred. So what are the options for 1920x1080? You could double the pixels and get 960x540, which is a rather awkward resolution because most things are designed for 480 or 600 lines (or multiples of 240 or 200 in general). You could triple the pixels and get 640x360, which is lower res than the Pandora 1 and not enough for VGA. None of these downscaled resolutions are particularly useful, especially not for things like retro emulation.

It's not like you'd use the same resolution for everything. Most emulators will use scaling no matter what the native resolution is. Here are some common heights for emulators: 144, 160, 192, 224, 240, 480. Most of these will scale to about 11.11% of the screen height unused, with 224 hitting worst at 17%. Compare with 720p, where you get hit really bad with 480 resolution (33% black space) and somewhat bad with 192 (20%). Sure, 800p is great for the resolutions you listed and it's the best for the ones I listed too - except 480p, where it's the worst. But if you can stand a little clipping or non-integer scaling that might not be that awful.
 
Also, Craig has hinted at plans to make SOC upgrades in the P2 possible with some kind of modularity, - if the P2 is going to have an extended sales lifespan and upgradeable processor(s) 1080p is a good plan - even if used with pixel doubling half the time.


One of the problems the P1 has atm is people looking at numerical specs and concluding that its useless. Just imagine the iPhone 7S with a WQXGA screen next to a P2 with a 'mere' WXGA.


Its a really stupid comparison to make, but it doesn't look good
 
Yes, and if Craig "hints" "plans" than it is probably just a thought he had on the toilet yesterday evening.


Whilst Craig is certainly the one from OPT who talked most about P2 until a while ago, I think it is ED who is chief in this case now.
 
Yes, and if Craig "hints" "plans" than it is probably just a thought he had on the toilet yesterday evening.


Whilst Craig is certainly the one from OPT who talked most about P2 until a while ago, I think it is ED who is chief in this case now.

What makes you think that?
 
What do you mean, the toilet-thing or the ED-thing?


Regarding ED, I'd speculate on that because he has the contacts to investors, GC(and not to forget the essential devs from the community) and because he manages P1 now (I remember Craig stating at one point that he sees himself just as a reseller these days, or similar).


EDIT: I obviously have no proofs on what happens on Craigs' WC ;)
 
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Craig seems to be the driving force behind the iCP2


I'm guessing that Craig gets things rolling, while ED ensures that they don't stop
 
Regarding ED, I'd speculate on that because he has the contacts to investors, GC(and not to forget the essential devs from the community) and because he manages P1 now (I remember Craig stating at one point that he sees himself just as a reseller these days, or similar).

EDIT: I obviously have no proofs on what happens on Craigs' WC ;)

You can make an argument that right now ED has resources Craig might not, but that doesn't necessarily make Craig subservient to him in deciding how Pandora 2 is designed. Ultimately Craig, MWeston, etc could (in theory, I'm not suggesting this) come up with the design entirely w/o ED's input, in which case it's merely up to ED to say or not whether he'll go with it.


That said, not sure all those resources necessarily even give ED that much of a majority manufacturing oversight for Pandora 2.. Craig intends to get money for it through KS so the investors relationships are irrelevant, Craig has the contacts for other parts of the manufacturing chain (like if the case will be developed in England using the iCP/2 people), GC might not strictly be a requirement (for instance if they don't need to use PoP this time - this is not to say that they wouldn't have reason to want to use them even then). ED may well be the central manufacturer for Pandora 1 now but that doesn't say much for what'll happen for Pandora 2, if it happens at all.
 
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I'm hoping that the technology behind these insane hires screens will make 1280x800 5" screens cheaper and better. As well as the availability of low-power CPU/GPUs that can deal with those high resolutions. I really don't need that insane amount of ppi on the Pandora 2, but it would be nice if it had full HD hdmi output and enough horsepower to decode movies at that resolution. But the screen itself should be a tradeoff between availability, quality, power consumption, and price - not just the highest possible resolution. I don't want to pay for pixels I can't see, and I certainly don't want those nanopixels to affect my battery life or cpu/gpu performance, and make me have to reconfigure everything to use way bigger font sizes because otherwise I can't read anything.

CPU load doesn't usually scale much with resolution unless you're stuck soft rendering the whole thing, so you don't really have to worry about that. Memory bandwidth should be both much higher - going from MDDR to at least LPDDR2 or DDR3 with clocks at least twice as high and two channels instead of one - and more accessible with improved SoC buses and better CPU latency hiding. Increased demands on space for framebuffer/backbuffer for 2D is absolutely piddly compared to the overall increase in RAM the device will have.
Soft rendering or mostly soft rendering is typically what you do in desktop stuff (file management, office stuff, browsers etc), and this is also the kind of stuff you really want to do at the native resolution because it involves lots of text in relatively small fonts that will degrade with scaling.


I agree that the increase in RAM use and bus bandwidth is not gonna cause problems, but then again, I wouldn't count on the P2 to have 8GB of RAM, imo a more realistic number would be 1 or 2 GB. A doublebuffer framebuffer is still only 16MB at full HD, so it's certainly not problematic, but it is more than the 3MB it currently takes on the Pandora 1.

Hardware video decode for 1080p30 with normal h.264 profiles is standard even on pretty low end Chinese SoCs these days. I wouldn't worry about that one either. And mobile GPUs have gotten faster at a much quicker pace than even CPUs have. The 200MHz SGX530 on the 1GHz Pandoras is very weak compared to what even an OMAP5 will have (2x SGX543MP2 @ 500MHz or so afaik), which will probably not be especially high end compared to what other SoCs are offering. We're talking 2-8 times more power per core per clock, 2.5x more clock speed, and 2x more cores, for 10-40x more power. Of course, 3D doesn't need to use the full resolution, and it doesn't really look as bad with non-integer scaling. Especially if you can get a high quality filter on it.


So I don't think driving 1080p content will necessarily be a huge challenge, which is good, because regardless of whether or not it has a 1080p screen it IS nice to be able to put 1080p content out over HDMI.
I agree that it would be nice to get 1080p output over HDMI, and that it should not be a huge challenge to find hardware that can do that (esp. since those phones will be able to do it). But I don't think the small screen should be at that resolution, because it's pointless to make the resolution that much better than what the human eye can see, and because we want a battery life that is better than that of those phones. Less pixels will mean better battery life, mostly because the screen itself will need less power.

This would all not be such a big problem if it was easy to put the display in an arbitrary lower resolution. But that's impossible with LCD: unless you use some integer fraction, it will look blurred. So what are the options for 1920x1080? You could double the pixels and get 960x540, which is a rather awkward resolution because most things are designed for 480 or 600 lines (or multiples of 240 or 200 in general). You could triple the pixels and get 640x360, which is lower res than the Pandora 1 and not enough for VGA. None of these downscaled resolutions are particularly useful, especially not for things like retro emulation.

It's not like you'd use the same resolution for everything. Most emulators will use scaling no matter what the native resolution is. Here are some common heights for emulators: 144, 160, 192, 224, 240, 480. Most of these will scale to about 11.11% of the screen height unused, with 224 hitting worst at 17%. Compare with 720p, where you get hit really bad with 480 resolution (33% black space) and somewhat bad with 192 (20%). Sure, 800p is great for the resolutions you listed and it's the best for the ones I listed too - except 480p, where it's the worst. But if you can stand a little clipping or non-integer scaling that might not be that awful.

Yes, and of course for emulation it would be better to have a 4:3 aspect ratio, say 1280x960. But that's probably impossible to find. I prefer 16:10 (1280x800) to 16:9 (HD or Full HD) though, because that's at least a bit closer to 16:12.

Also, Craig has hinted at plans to make SOC upgrades in the P2 possible with some kind of modularity, - if the P2 is going to have an extended sales lifespan and upgradeable processor(s) 1080p is a good plan - even if used with pixel doubling half the time.


One of the problems the P1 has atm is people looking at numerical specs and concluding that its useless. Just imagine the iPhone 7S with a WQXGA screen next to a P2 with a 'mere' WXGA.


Its a really stupid comparison to make, but it doesn't look good
The P2 specs will be outdated for those number fetishists 6 months after its release anyway. We should have good specs where it matters. Our target audience should be people who actually understand what the numbers mean, not people who just want something with the biggest numbers. Sure, we could put in 16 cores at 4GHz each, that would burn a hole in your hand and explode the battery if you would have software that actually uses them all, just to make the specs look good, but let's not do that kind of stuff.
 
Well, than I can only hope that ED is the one who places decisions in the end.


Mainly because he seems to be the one who is really dedicated to get the pandora and the community forward. Craig on the other side, so it seems to me, hasn't got much to do with it at all these days and silenced pretty quickly after the rush on the 1GHz units. Now that I think about it: Did Craig announce to his customers that he wont be able to deliver more P1GHz because he couldn't pay for them or was it ED - after months of waiting for the people who paid this pretty high price?


This is just the impression I get as an unregular visitor but first Craig was all about the pandora and then became quiet about it completly as ED took over, concentrating on the iCP, then ED lifted the pandora from the ruins - bam, there is Craig again talking about P2 and the 1GHz units, but once these didn't sell anymore/he couldn't pay for them: Let's better be silent about it and, Hey people here is the iCP2, money now please, surely I will deliver in November.


Craig, of course, will be very communicative about the P2 as long as it raises money on the potential KS, but I fear that once things get problematic he will just silence the problems away and, possibly ultimatly, it will be someone else again who will have to solve them.


/rant
 
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