It just crossed my mind when I was looking through some colours on the Pantone site. There apparently is an iPhone aplication for Pantone and it seems like something potentially quite useful.

Obviously, the colours will never be the same on the screen as in real life, but nevertheless, I could easily find this quite helpful in my own work in comms business, off-work in free time when thinking colours for home deco etc.

How could we go about this?

All N900s have the exact same screen so you could calibrate this to be exactly right?

I'm guessing this is what they've done on the iPhone.

How the hell can you copyright a colour anyway!?

Pantones are not copyrighted, they are simply industry standard so regardless of what monitor you are using to run the initial design you can specify exact "spot colours" which you need to print to. Printers will all know what you mean by a "pastel process uncoated" or a "process coated" colour reference, usually dicated by a Pantone reference such as Pantone 471. You can also specify "metallic process" pantones for hot stamped foil etc in case you want reflective metallic writing.

Not sure how much use a Pantone reference chart would be on a phone though. I could simply create a massive reference chart with each colour of p[antone in it for anyone who wants to write an application to run them in. The simple chart could then directly link to the colour, and the phone's screen would display the entire colour.

I'm no coder, but I know my design apps

That could do, if someone's able to do the work. However, I have always found the neighbouring colour strips useful as they allow to look for combinations, gradual changes etc. For me, the exact mixing details are not that important but rather the visual tool to look for tones and basic colours quickly, then zoom in the selected strip and finally the colour itself.

I had a chance to compare the Pantone color on both iPhone screen and the "fan" strip. Pre-press and color-correction is my profession. So I think a software like this can't be a strict reference due to the different nature of color systems which emit light to those reflecting it. But it is a wonderful opportunity to the color communication, e.g. a designer could show a sample of color to his customer right away on the phone screen. Another problem with this app is iPhone's screen: the color depends a lot from the viewing angle. This is crucial to tiny hue differences between Pantone color items. Depending from the view angle a color can look like any of its four neighbours on the strip. BTW I didn't had a chance yet to investigate N900's screen from this point of view. I'll try to make a test and post it later. But at a glance N900's screen doesn't seem to have such angled hue shift as iPhone does.

But, I do like to have an app like this on my N900 as well.
I even tried to figure out how a device like N900 can be calibrated. Especially with its 16 bit color table.
Well, programming is not my good point. But as color enthusiast I'm ready to take part in this job.

I'm back after a quick test: Same number color patches (represented on iPhone with myPntone app and on N900's built-in image viewer in sRGB jpeg file) look very close to each other on both devices. I mean same far from the paper sample. Viewing angle problem on N900 presents but fractions of the iPhone's strengths. I can conclude from the test that Pantone didn't do its job well; they could make an app more fine-tuned, preciser. But this is a huge amount of work. May be next release will be better.

I would have thought that N900 has a better screen... Led-display it isn't but that bad... well, what do we know.

If someone's interested in putting some time to this, I'd be one happy user. Let's see if more people show any attention to the proposal.

so has this just died?

i too could really use an app such as this!!

just create loads of 800x480 jpegs with the colours you want and create a webpage that has those jpegs tagged with img and links to full screen versions?

e: here you can find codes to correct colours

http://www.umsiko.co.za/links/color.html