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.