// Pocket Picks //

We were looking at this shot on AVING of the new Glofiish Windows Mobile 6 X500+ smartphone (which has just been shown at the Computex show in Taiwan), admiring its VGA 480 x 640 pixel screen, and started wondering how that really compares to the QVGA (and lower) resolution screens that we’re used to. QVGA is 240 x 320 pixels — which doesn’t sound that much smaller than 480 x 640, does it? And the iPhone is 320 x 480 pixels, which is pretty nice. Well, we thought that too… Until we laid out the below comparison chart…

Basically, VGA is absolutely massive (for a mobile phone screen). Up there in the top corner, for reference, is the 176 x 208 pixel screen size that a lot of Series 60 Nokias were shipping with a couple of years back (the N70 runs that size display). Back in the mid-1990s, it was common for desktop computers to ship with a VGA monitor, which is perhaps more telling than anything of how far technology has advanced in the last 15 years.

That amount of screen real estate means you can realistically run internet browsers (without needing to do a lot of scrolling and zooming, iPhone fans), view documents, play detailed games, and generally view a lot of information on screen at the same time. Bear in mind, though, that screen resolution and screen size are different, independent things. QVGA screens, the current standard for most decent mainstream phones, ship between 2-3″ in size — but actually that resolution isn’t too different from that of 80s and early 90s arcade game machines, which just stretched the pixels across a big old monitor.

And of course, the story won’t end with VGA. Sharp’s new Advanced ES handset offers WVGA, which is an amazing 480 x 854 pixels — heading on for 50% more screen space than VGA. So if you’re feeling a bit restricted by the display in your current phone, don’t stress. Three years from now new phones will probably have more pixels than your current laptop…