“Before you get started, you have to realize how small the screen you're targeting really is, not just in terms of resolution, but also in terms of physical size. Take a business card, and cut it in half that's about the size you are designing for.”
This shows how the designer must adapt to design with the small screen in mind. If the mobile phone is ever going to be a useful way to display media types, especially visual ones, special consideration must be taken with design. Rather than just displaying normal sites designed for monitor aspect ratios
“In technical terms, the display on a Symbian Series 60 phone is 176 x 208 pixels, which is only slightly bigger than the screen size of other Flash Lite–enabled phones. Of course, if your application is not running in full-screen mode, you have even less room to work with.”
This shows how small an area designers are forced to work with if the are designing media or websites specifically for mobile phones. The complications of small screen sizes do not end their. Screen sizes on mobile phones are not a standard size or aspect ratio, this makes designing for them an impossibility. What may look fine designed for one screen size and ratio may look terrible for another. Is some standardisation needed? I think to some extent yes, however this will restrict the design of phone dramatically. But I feel that this needed so that designers are clear what they are working for.
“Note also that mobile phones use a vertical aspect ratio. Desktop content is often created with a TV-like 4:3 or a cinematic 16:9 aspect ratio. On a small device screen, you don't want to waste a pixel, so you really have to think through the design of your animation to make the most of the limited space.”
This again reiterates the constraints of mobile phone screen sizes and their lack of standard aspect ratio compared to TV’s and Monitors.
“Don't let the resolution of the device fool you; it is actually pretty decent. However, each pixel is smaller than on your desktop monitor, because the dots-per-inch (DPI) ratio is higher. You can easily verify that by holding the phone next to a Flash movie of the same size on your desktop monitor. Depending on your monitor, the phone display will have only some 70% of the screen real estate.”
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1 comment:
A logical personal opinion, but as a user if you take your symbian mobile tv a feet away from your view then you can take a decent view of it, just an example. On the otherhand, a wider display screen size could have been better if nokia has it to encourage multimedia mobile developers without the constraint of having a small display to deal with.
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