Friday 12 October 2012

5 facts about smartphone display





                                Display is the vital part of a smartphone as it is the interaction medium between you and your phone and there are a handful of things to be considered other than display size. A buyer should not blindly go on with what a sales man says, just go through this article and compare your smartphone and see how it had turned out.Please drop us a comment if you find this article informative and helpful. 

               

        i.            TOUCHSCREEN TECHNOLOGY

                                There are two types of touchscreen technology widely used in smartphones – Resistive Touchscreen & Capacitive Touchscreen. Simple definitions for them are the Resistive touch screens are used in older generation smartphones and it is almost impossible to achieve multitouch in these type of screens. Resistive touch screens respond only to pressure applied on them irrespective of the surface touched, so it responds even while wearing gloves, nails, and almost all type of surfaces, typical example for a resistive touch screen device is Nokia 5800 Xpress Music. On the other hand capacitive touchscreens are more sensitive and they respond only to thermal energy i.e heat from your body, that is the sole reason for them to respond to slightest of touches from your skin. Now almost all latest OEM’s use capacitive touch screens for their devices.
      ii.            DISPLAY TYPE:

                                Various display types now under the radar are TFT, OLED and AMOLED.TFT are the most common type of displays used in the recent years, but the advent of more advanced forms like OLED, AMOLED made TFT a property for mid-range devices. OLED’s are still employed by some manufacturers but AMOLED had stolen the market share in the high-end devices. AMOLED’s are not perfect though, they eat a lot of battery while displaying white colored pixels. This is the reason for them to possess a poor battery time while browsing the web.
    iii.            PIXEL DENSITY:

                                Pixel Density or Pixels per inch (ppi) is generally a combined mathematical equivalent of diagonal length of the display and the display resolution.
Lets consider Samsung Galaxy S3 as an example.
Screen Resolution is 720*1280 pixels
Diagonal Length is 4.8 inches

                                In case consider yourself buying a device with a large screen, say a diagonal length of 4.8 inches but with a screen resolution of 640*480 pixels, then your will certainly end up with a meager 167 ppi. Lower values of ppi like this will end up in pixilation that means rounded edges, pictures with fine details will look quirky, and videos with quick movements will look like a combination of 100 square boxes for eg. It looks almost like playing a 3gp video in your pc in full screen. Any device above 220 ppi can give you a pleasant experience.


     iv.            PROTECTION LAYER:

                                Most of the high end phones comes with protective glass layers above their display. Most common manufacturer of protective glasses is Corning, their Gorilla glasses are the best in business, they are even proved for being scratch resistant to knife edges. OEM’s like Sony are using Mineral glasses, which too are scratch resistant but are not as effective as Corning’s Gorilla. Noticeable OEM’s using Corning’s Gorilla glasses are Samsung, Nokia, HTC, Apple & RIM (Blackberry).
       v.            MULTITOUCH:

                                Multitouch are solely the property belonging to Capacitive touch screens. A budget smart phone will atleast have a multitouch ability sensing upto 2 fingers, good enough for zooming up and down the images. High end devices support multitouch for about 6 - 8 fingers. Anyone on the look out for a high end device do consider this ability, because it can be of great use in many of the apps.


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