Toshiba 911T: 800×480, But Resolution Isn’t Everything
Before moving back to Tokyo in October I was using an iPhone as my primary mobile phone. The iPhone’s resolution is 480×320 and 3.5 inches in size diagonally. That’s 153,600 pixels. Man, the screen is so nice.
153,600 pixels of love
So, it was reasonable for me to assume an even better experience from my new Toshiba 911T, one of the only full-featured phones available in Japan to have both English T9 and a 3-inch “WVGA” display which is a whopping 800×480 resolution. That’s 384,000 pixels — well over twice the iPhone’s resolution.
384,000 wasted pixels
Well, you know what happens when you assume. Yes, the 800×480 display is insanely crisp when viewing photos — that can’t be debated. However, everything else — text, video, one-seg TV, menu graphics, etcetera, just lack the smoothness and crispness which seems so effortless on the iPhone. As is often the case with hardware these days — it all comes down to great software.
The iPhone is scaling and smoothing its beautiful fonts while the Toshiba looks pixelated and sometimes even worse than the older QVGA (320×240) displays that were once the standard in Japan. Further, there are no high resolution icons or other aspects of the interface to take advantage of this magnificent display. Even the “PC Browser” — a browser for viewing web sites which were designed for PC web browsers — is inferior to iPhone’s Safari in terms of font readability. Besides the great quality when viewing photos, about the only positive thing I can say is that if I did want to view super tiny and almost unreadable text on a mobile phone I would have the option available to me.
Don’t get me wrong — I really like this phone. It’s got UMTS HSDPA, FeliCa RFID, a 3-megapixel autofocus camera, takes great videos, has English T9 input, one-seg TV, a micro-SD port, syncs with iSync (Thanks to the gods at Reudo!) and a lot more — even Bluetooth A2DP (though rather useless without MP3 playback). But, it’s no iPhone.
Once the iPhone comes out in Japan, I wonder if the average Japanese customer will even care about this issue. I have shown Japanese Windows users the amazing quality of the Japanese fonts on my Mac many times and most seem to be either oblivious or ambivalent. I can’t explain it. See for yourself:
Windows - Hurts my eyes
Mac OS X - Feels so much better
I’m looking forward to enjoying great readability here in Japan once the iPhone arrives or someone else picks up the torch — hopefully Sony Ericsson.