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Posts: 1,335 | Thanked: 3,931 times | Joined on Jul 2010 @ Brittany, France
#152
Originally Posted by chenliangchen View Post
Let's not get the tension too high.

I'm fully aware of there being a demand of smaller screen devices, never denied it. Let's put the argument of which one is better aside, just for reality... in order to create a successful project commercially, doing a smaller screen is much much harder than, I say the mainstream size.

As a small company, on some of the parts we are relying on some standard components, not being the same as others but within a certain range of "tweak". For example, for a screen around 5.5", let's say from 5.0" to 6.0", there are plenty of suppliers to choose from, and we can modify the panel slightly to fit the sensors, we can choose the best TP, even with flex edge AMOLED despite being very expensive and hard to get.

On the other hand, if we do this device in 4" or 4.3", as many of you loved, it will be much much more difficult and risky to make it successful. First of all the modern phone has more components inside than 3G phones 10 years ago. More antennas, more sensors, even more cameras. Fitting everything in a small body plus a keyboard will make the device significantly chunkier (In modern standard, I know most people here probably won't care ) But this is not the biggest issue. The biggest problem is there is no good suppliers, all the 4" screens you can order or tweak nowadays are very poor TFT and FWVGA at its most. I know most of you probably won't care again compared with N900, but we won't have a chance to be successful if we use such poor quality screen. On the other hand, yes we can customise a new display from scratch, (my wishlist is AMOLED bezel-less and maybe 4.5 inch?) But this will involve a HUGE (I mean HUGE) front investment to make a new display product, and there will be risk of having problem here and there, and cause delays. Moreover, we need a number of shipment to supply this screen production. In general a few hundreds of thousands should be adequate, but how much units we can sell with it? It will be hard to even support this screen production, if there is no one else is using it. Unless we are Samsung or old Nokia, that can sell enough units to support production.

Making a slider phone, especially a slider phone and trying to catch up with a decent specs, quality, camera is very very costly. We have limited resources and it would be wiser we don't spend our resources creating a new screen, but on slider, camera, build quality etc.

I personally have used N810 N900 Jolla N950... I fully understand your feeling on a smaller device. I don't want to raise the argument, but at least it would be worth trying the nowadays mainstream screen size and ratio. Due to the removal of bezels it's not being as big as it sounds, but it does give a lot benefit - I can do so many more things on it than N900. Imaging running some decent part of Maemo on a 5.5" screen, it might not be the best for all (in fact there is nothing that everyone being happy with) but I would strongly advice at least give it a try.

That doesn't mean the dead of smaller screen sliders. We need to do one step at a time. So if this project is proven successful, and we have a slightly bigger scale and better resources, there is certainly a chance of having a 4" slider. But we need to get THIS product being correct first.

Last but not least, if you are disappointed about the size of the screen, and don't want to try the mainstream size, there is nothing wrong. But please regard this as the first step we need to take in order to achieve the product you want.

(And please let's keep calm)
Enough talking Chen. I said the same here a couple weeks ago just to save your precious time so that you could use it to hand write a love note for me and put in the box of my ReadyFx to ship the next day. But my damn mailbox is empty, don't you realize that you broke my heart?

(Just kidding. Great post to clarify priorities. As I said several times, you convincingly demonstrated that this is the right strategy, and this comes from someone who, in an ideal world with unlimited budget, would prefer a smaller but chunkier form factor. I'm still eagerly waiting for the ReadyFx, just hoping that alternative OS will be ported soon after its release.)
 

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