VGA, QVGA, Landscape, Portrait- what does it all mean and why should you care? This summer brings a wealth of new devices and you're going to want to have a basic understanding of what you can expect, and I'm going to try to break it down the best I can.
In the world of Windows Mobile devices, there are 2 'orientations' (or layouts) of the content on your screen- first, and most popularly, there's portrait. Portrait is the long and narrow layout which shows more lines of content on the screen. This means that you can have more plugins on your today screen (because each plugin would occupy a few lines one after the other). You'd also see more list items- for example when looking at your task list, or emails received.
The second orientation is landscape. This is a wider layout and is shorter, so you get longer lines of text before it wraps to the next line. Also, when watching movies, you won't need to hold your device sideways to watch it in fullscreen mode.
Media Player in portrait and the landscape orientation
You would think that in this day and age all applications would be developed in a way to adapt to the screen automatically, but unfortunately that is not the case.
Here's an example of an application (TunIt Radio) which works well in portrait mode, but cuts off and needs to be scrolled when used on a landscape device. Some applications won't even run on a landscape device! This is especially vexing since it is possible to manually switch the orientation of your device to be able to run those applications. Of course, you wouldn't keep your device permanently running in the opposite orientation as your keyboard and/or numberpad would be in the wrong place!
The third option here which isn't used very often is the square-screen, which is used by the Treo devices. Personally, I find the square-screen to be the most annoying as its touch and go with which applications will run on it. Also, you don't the benefit of either landscape or portrait.
Once you've wrapped your head around the layout possibilities then you have to understand the resolution options. The 2 big ones are VGA and QVGA. Without getting too technical, the difference between the two is in the clarity of the screen- VGA will smooth the fonts and images due to a higher resolution than QVGA will. VGA has (typically) 640 by 480 pixels which show crisper details and images. QVGA has (typically) 320 by 240 pixels which show a lower quality of images and details because of fewer pixels.
QVGA and VGA screens
Ideally, the VGA is the most desirable of the two as it allows you to show more information on the screen because you can have smaller images and text still crisp and readable. However, again we run into the issue of developed applications for VGA, because some developers will simply double-pixelate (or stretch) the application to fill the screen which completely defeats the purpose:
Your lovely crisp screen goes from the above to this:
My best advice when picking a new device is to check with the manufacturer's website of any software that you depend on to see if it will run on the resolution and orientation of your dream machine. Good luck, and happy picking!
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