I suppose there's always the possibility (however unlikely) that the N900/RX-51 screen could be something other than 800x480; for example, 1024x600. The N770 was pushing 800x480 to the market years before the competition. In fact, we're only now hearing about other devices implementing these screens and one has yet to be released AFAIK. I suppose it's not unreasonable to entertain the possibility a before-its-time-screen can happen again with the N900/RX-51.

Keeping hope alive...

YARR!
}:^)~

Caaaa Coooo

The alpha SDKs that Nokia has released to the community have all specified an 800x480 resolution, but that might be misdirection... Also, when I spoke of a smaller screen being a bad thing, the Nokians were not encouraging in that area, so it may very well be that we get 800x480, but on a physically smaller screen. That would be interesting, although not very welcome from me...

Deducing what qgil said regarding the screen resolution.. it is most probably going to be 800x480. But if they are going to make the screen smaller .... they better have different versions. I hope they give us a 5" screen... that would be a good thing to diffrentiate between a phone and a internet tablet.

I'll be really really sad - and who wants that

Yeah, bigger screen would be good, smaller not good.

I remember the days when everyone had 14" CRTs that ran at 640x480 (and then later, when you got really crazy, 800x600)... and a few years later EVERYONE complained when higher resolutions started showing up that "everything is soo small and tiny I can't see any of it!". These days you're hard pressed to find people running 800x600 on normal desktop systems (netbooks/tablets/etc aside of course since they have fixed resolutions). The point to be had though is that even today I find many, many people who run their desktops at lower resolutions than the "native" one simply because they want to have things larger and easier to see... so if Nokia is aiming at making the next gen tablets "less niche market" the last thing they'd want to do is put a smaller screen of the same resolution on there... After all, if you're trying to make the thing the size of a cellphone, what's the point? Cell phones already exist, there are tons of them out there with full touch screens... as much as I love Maemo and the open Linux architecture, if Nokia built the next tablet device simply as exactly the same as say 10 other pieces of hardware out there, but with Maemo powering it, the sales figures wouldn't equate to squat; as everyone's said, the real market for the tablet is in a hardware form that nobody else has (I think that's been the "Nokia" argument in the past for NOT using a larger screen size btw; you can get panel PCs (heck even netbooks) that start at about 6-7" screens... so the tablet's gotta be sort of half way inbetween).

What I find interesting is that the next-gen tablet mockup shown at the Maemo Summit already use parts of the current Nseries design language (of the N79/N97) like the positioning and design of the front Nokia logo...

I wouldn't be surprised if the RX-51 actually looked like a somewhat evolved version of that:

http://flickr.com/photos/kypeli/2884713151/

Anyway, I hope that the slightly smaller, keyboard-less "version" of the N97 in the video is a new smartphone...

I certainly don't!

@nikolajhendel

Thanks for the laugh!

@anyone else who cares to read the rest of my post

I think that screen technology is tending towards a point of resolution independence for devices.

At one point, we relied upon fix fonts and bitmap icons for fast display, but most modern operating systems have elements of resolution independence built in: vector fonts, rasterized interfaces, svg icons, etc. Even linux based x windows include details of the screens dimensions (in addition to the resolution) which opens the possibility of resolution independent windows which select programs/toolkits take advantage of.

It's evident in video games and movies, that display the same content regardless of the resolution. The increased resolution just means increased clarity.

Web technologies are beginning to show this as well. CSS has the unit 'em' to size fonts, and even flash (which heavily relies upon vectors) makes it easy to scale the window regardless of the screen resolution. In these scenarios, on the same sized screen, the objects will remain a constant size, regardless of the res.

Certainly freemantle seems to be no exception to this direction. The hinted clutter based UI is inherently vector based (polygons). The neat thing about Maemo apps is that the majority of them (correct me if I'm wrong) always display at near full screen, which make Freemantle the PERFECT platform to push the idea of resolution independence.

From a UI developers standpoint, resolution independence should be EASIER, provided the tools exist to display vectors, scale rasters, etc, so long as a sane viewing window size is assumed. This is because developers no longer need to consider the case of different resolutions when producing works. In other words, they can consider a static viewing window, and just worry about the contents rather than alternate view cases.

So, I think that, with the right mind-set and developer tools, the N900 could easily handle a 1024x600 (and beyond) screen, without implying eye-strain.

Have a lucky day!

YARR!
}:^)~

[apt'n [orrupt

[quote=Capt'n Corrupt;264270
So, I think that, with the right mind-set and developer tools, the N900 could easily handle a 1024x600 (and beyond) screen, without implying eye-strain.

Have a lucky day!

YARR!
}:^)~

[apt'n [orrupt[/quote]

Heheh. Since I already have to use reading glasses (x2 power) for my N800, I should be able to make the transition to the new device without any major readjustments.