hecatae
27th May 2006, 06:14 PM
http://blogs.s60.com/mrktngman/2006/05/less_is_more.html
Software tends to bloat over time. It has happened to PC software and it seems to be happening to our product. Im actually very proud when there is courage in the organization to drop some old features and I want to encourage doing it more often, especially when better usability is achieved. One example is dropping of Wallet application. Now we have also decided to drop resolution support for 176x208 and double of that from 3rd Edition FP1 onward. QVGA is becoming widely used standard resolution in smartphones. Display component prices are dropping and supporting reduced set of resolutions makes life in platform development easier, less verification and testing and Im sure it helps also in 3rd party application development and testing.
There is an inbuilt scalable UI framework in the platform need for it is not going away. Market demand is for higher resolutions such as HVGA and VGA and platform is developing to this direction. We also have to keep in mind that platform is flexible and our customers, licensees, can finally implement something different and use scalability function. Nokia 5500 is a good example about this. It has 208x208 display resolution.
list of people disappointed at the loss of 352sx416. While I recognize the advantages of supporting a limited number of resolutions, Nokia's most likely lost a customer of the E70 - if FP1 drops support for that phone's screen resolution, developers still in the process of porting their apps to v3 may skip E70 compatibility completely if they know the screen resolution is a dead end. Maybe announcing that part of FP1 before the E70 is widely released was a bad idea...
so thats all those shiny new N80s that'll never be upgradeable OTA:D
Plus why develop applications for a screen format that being dropped
Both 176x208 and 352x416 will be dropped.
Moving forward is a good thing. Which means QVGA will become standard and VGA will be used for upper end models.
They mentioned HVGA (640x240). At that resolution, I think there will be a 9300/9500 S60 revision.
S60 is still scalable, but everything will be optimized for QVGA. So future apps might not look nice (if they install at all).
Software tends to bloat over time. It has happened to PC software and it seems to be happening to our product. Im actually very proud when there is courage in the organization to drop some old features and I want to encourage doing it more often, especially when better usability is achieved. One example is dropping of Wallet application. Now we have also decided to drop resolution support for 176x208 and double of that from 3rd Edition FP1 onward. QVGA is becoming widely used standard resolution in smartphones. Display component prices are dropping and supporting reduced set of resolutions makes life in platform development easier, less verification and testing and Im sure it helps also in 3rd party application development and testing.
There is an inbuilt scalable UI framework in the platform need for it is not going away. Market demand is for higher resolutions such as HVGA and VGA and platform is developing to this direction. We also have to keep in mind that platform is flexible and our customers, licensees, can finally implement something different and use scalability function. Nokia 5500 is a good example about this. It has 208x208 display resolution.
list of people disappointed at the loss of 352sx416. While I recognize the advantages of supporting a limited number of resolutions, Nokia's most likely lost a customer of the E70 - if FP1 drops support for that phone's screen resolution, developers still in the process of porting their apps to v3 may skip E70 compatibility completely if they know the screen resolution is a dead end. Maybe announcing that part of FP1 before the E70 is widely released was a bad idea...
so thats all those shiny new N80s that'll never be upgradeable OTA:D
Plus why develop applications for a screen format that being dropped
Both 176x208 and 352x416 will be dropped.
Moving forward is a good thing. Which means QVGA will become standard and VGA will be used for upper end models.
They mentioned HVGA (640x240). At that resolution, I think there will be a 9300/9500 S60 revision.
S60 is still scalable, but everything will be optimized for QVGA. So future apps might not look nice (if they install at all).