I recently bought an N9 off ebay and it is a 16Gb Black chinese variant.. question is that the clock displayed in the standby screen is not sharp and crisp i mean it is shining with some purple tint around the edges (when i see it real close , when at a distance it is fine)and at the instance of the lock button pressed i can see it sharp and crisp. i have read a lot of articles about the pentile issue maybe it is that . I want to know if it is by default like that or is it only me with this issue.

white is R+G+B
from one side you see blue, red from other and green from last.

but of course you can disable low power mode on standby and get big battery usage in idle

By default it is already like that.

okay ..thank you people.Its clear now.

Low power mode allows each individual subpixel to be either on or off, no intermediate values. So the subpixel rendering that makes pentile look almost like it has 1.5*actual resolution can't work properly there and you have that result.

That PenTile display is pretty much the only hardware flaw I can see in the N9.

Well, PenTile or not wouldn't really matter much if the base resolution were higher. With macroblock sizes (in H.264 et al) of 16 by 16 and an aspect ratio of 16:9, viable display resolution are whole multiples of 256 by 144. The next higher step from the N9's display would be 1024 by 576, then 1280 by 720, then 1536 by 864.

As I have said elsewhere, even this resolution is (or was, a year ago) impossible without pentile. It seems there's a lower limit to the size of amoled subpixels. When it was released the N9 had one of the densest amoled screens.

Even now I don't think the situation has changed very much. After the GSII not even samsung has used rgb stripe again and according to wikipedia they're the worlds bigger amoled manufacturer by a wide margin.

Thanks for the info, it was rather insightful!

Now I wonder how Jolla will resolve the inherent tradeoffs between LCD and AMOLED.

Edit: Also, whether PenTile should be used or not. Since the eyes' resolution with regards to color is worse than for pure luminance, PenTile *should* be strictly better, but the proof's in the pudding.

check this out for more details if you're interested http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=79624