bioneural.net site preferences

Accessibility

Toggle width/ text size:

style

Default/Alternate

Suits visual impairment, mobile devices

Styling

Change the theme:

layout

NB: may reduce functionality

Link behaviour

Links with an icon are off-site:

links

Right-click any link to optionally open in a new window or tab


What use is a VGA screen on a PDA?

Pocket PCs can now do VGA i.e. 640 x 480 pixels—at least with third-party software. Here are three screen captures that provide pretty convincing proof of how useful this can be. They show a PDF instruction manual for a Seiko watch as viewed on the Palm T3 (480 x 320 pixel screen; Acrobat Reader displays non-native documents at 160 x 160 resolution) and on a Dell X50v (native PDF at semi-VGA and "real" VGA resolution). If a picture says a thousand words, here are 3000 on the difference...

Page 9 viewed with Acrobat Reader 3.05 on Palm T3:

pdfpalm

Page 9 viewed with Acrobat Reader 2 on Dell X50v at "native" VGA resolution:

pdfvga

Page 9 viewed with Acrobat Reader 2 on Dell X50v at "real" VGA resolution:

pdfrealvga

Want to know more? There's a very detailed discussion on VGA issues here.

Update 15.11.05: With the release of Documents To Go version 8, Dataviz introduced the ability to view native PDFs on the Palm. Here's how it renders (badly, slowly) on the T3:

0 responses to “What use is a VGA screen on a PDA?”


  1. No comments

Something to say?

Comments may be moderated (e.g. no commercial promotion), are subject to spam filtering, and should be relevant to this post—otherwise make contact.

Usable tags include <a href=""> <blockquote> <em>. Select any text and click to quote.