Samsung Smartphone to Have Poor Color Screen?

Posted By: Ed Tuesday, April 24, 2001 1:50:16 PM

TechTV has a review of a pre-production Samsung SPH-I300 smartphone, which is scheduled for release sometime late this summer. The reviewer had a number of complaints about the color screen, describing it as "dull and washed out". He also described dark vertical bands which didn't disappear even when the contrast was cranked all the way up.

Like the just-announced HandEra 330, the SPH-I300 has a virtual graffiti area. However, the only application that can currently take advantage of the device's 160x240 resolution is its built-in phone dialer.

The screen can display 256 colors and appears to be smaller than those of Palm's typical devices. The entire smartphone is only 2.28 inches wide, which is roughly the size of just the screen on Palm's current models. It has a small area at the top of the screen devoted to calling information such as caller ID, time and roaming and a power indicator.

Samsung Demos Smartphone at CeBit

On the Web:

Samsung Merges PDA With Phone

Special thanks to Martin Gunnarsson who took this SPH-I300 picture at CeBit. -Ed

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Cebit

I.M. Anonymous @ 4/24/2001 2:38:34 PM #

As of Cebit Samsung only had 9 of these things built. I think they are still very rough pre-production models.

Only time will tell.

CTIA

I.M. Anonymous @ 4/24/2001 3:43:15 PM #

I got my hands on one at the CTIA show March 20-22. I thought the screen looked pretty bad (dull and washed out). Maybe it's the same technology as in the Palm m505 :o

RE: CTIA

I.M. Anonymous @ 4/25/2001 10:50:31 AM #

I think that this may be a pre production at least I hope it is. For me having used mono in the past with Handspring and with a palm m100 for me I am trying color for the first time with the m505. If the product is not acutally out yet as the final then we shouldn't knock until you sample the goods. I believe they may be a change in the final but we'll see

RE: Samsung Screen

Ed @ 4/26/2001 11:39:10 AM #

They gave the unit to this guy knowing he was going to write a review on it. You'd think if they were going to make any major changes, they'd have let him know so he could mention it in his article. That fact that they didn't makes me suspect that what he reviewed is close to the final version.

---
Plenipotentiary
Palm Infocenter

Samsung Smartphone Screen

I.M. Anonymous @ 4/24/2001 4:55:30 PM #

I have a feeling that it may have been a passive-matrix (known also as supertwist) screen on the demo models. They're cheap, and could have been what they were using for the development effort in the meantime. Just a hunch.

Yes, it has a poor screen, link to picture included

I.M. Anonymous @ 4/24/2001 5:01:28 PM #

Me and a good friend of mine (Hi Niclas!) went to the CeBIT expo earlier this year, where we had a real close look at the Samsung Smartphone. We both thought the screen was terrible, and tried to make it better by adjusting the contrast. No luck.

Here's a picture:
http://www.snarl-up.com/samsung.jpg

--
Martin Gunnarsson

RE: Thanks for the picture

Ed @ 4/24/2001 5:40:31 PM #

That picture is great and says it all. Thanks very much for posting it. Would you mind if I added a copy of it to this article?

---
Plenipotentiary
Palm Infocenter

RE: Yes, it has a poor screen, link to picture included

martin @ 4/24/2001 6:12:28 PM #

No, not at all, but it would be nice if you my name somewhere around there!

:-)

--
Martin Gunnarsson

Proliferation of screen resolutions

Legible @ 4/24/2001 9:32:20 PM #

I am concerned about the proliferation of screen resolutions:

Palm/Handspring 160X160
SONY 320X320
Handera 320X240
Samsung 240X160
What next?

Shouldn't Palm control this so that the poor 3rd Party Developers at least know what to expect?

RE: Proliferation of screen resolutions

I.M. Anonymous @ 4/24/2001 11:22:58 PM #

i know, this is a pain in the butt. but, if we just hold out another year or so, I'm hoping the market will settle dwon a bit and a standard will emerge. so far it's been 160x160, but it will probably become better over the next year or so

RE: Proliferation of screen resolutions

bcombee @ 4/25/2001 1:02:18 AM #

I don't think the situation is so bad.

Even with four standards, most applications will be designed for the existing 160x160 screen. If you're using Palm OS forms for your application, these get treated like virtual coordinates, and scale well to the square portion of any screen.

Sony's 320x320 works very well, with the ability to better render features or to just double-scale everything.

Samsung's 160x240 is also fine -- it acts like 160x160 unless programs specify otherwise due to its soft graffiti area.

The Handera device is the most bothersome. While I applaud their innovation in getting a 240x320 screen to run existing Palm programs, this puts programs which are fixed at 160x160 in a bind due to rounding errors inherent in scaling each dimension by 1.5. From reading Handera's developer documentation, it looks like they've thought this out a bit, but I'm still curious to see how well it will work. I don't think this is going to be a gamer's Palm OS device.

RE: Proliferation of screen resolutions

I.M. Anonymous @ 4/25/2001 3:00:10 AM #

No, it is not "a gamer's Palm OS device".
HandEra is pretty obvious about their intent for addressing the corporate market-- a market where Palm has made much noise, but never addressed the hardware requirements which have had choices leaning to PocketPCs.
HandEra makes many advantages heretofore of the PocketPC totally moot. I think this is good for the Palm OS as a whole.

I'm Willing to Wait & See

Eddie Willers @ 4/25/2001 5:45:45 AM #

Since getting my IIIc over a year ago, I realize that I cannot go back to a greyscale model. The Kyrocera Smartphone is nice, but... no color. When I replace this one I would like it to be with a combo model, so I hope & pray for two things; 1) that this Smartphone is refined before mass production & 2) that one version will be GSM.

RE: I'm Willing to Wait & See

philmair @ 4/25/2001 8:31:51 AM #

Me to !!

RE: I'm Willing to Wait & See

mikecane @ 4/25/2001 10:13:38 AM #

Eddie Willers?! Is that your actual name or is this an Atlas Shrugged avatar type of thing?!

Right direction

I.M. Anonymous @ 4/25/2001 6:53:30 AM #

Samsung is moving in the right direction. Hopefully in the production unit they up the resolution to 320 width with 480 or more to vertical resolution. Alternatively, they could join Handera with 240x320 with at least 256 colours with frontlighting. They already have voicememo as per Handera.

In addition SD/MMC would make the Samsung very appealing. This is probably probably a bit much to expect. However, if they don't do enough the first time, they may not get enough sales to encourage them to continue future development in the direction of a PalmPhone.

Hopefully they will be successful enough to upgrade to an even more feature packed PalmPhone.

Early version of the screen

I.M. Anonymous @ 4/25/2001 10:02:54 AM #

Seeing as how this was a pre-production model(I sincerely hope), then one would think they've improved it since then. Perhaps this was similar to the m505 screen that was bashed mercilessly in the early reviews. If it is the actual screen people will see when the phone ships, then YIKES!

SPH-I300

I.M. Anonymous @ 5/14/2001 2:56:12 PM #

pros
-integrated palm pda w/ phone
-size
-color screen
-speaker phone
-one touch vibrate
-ability to talk w/ sepakerphone while usinf palm

cons
-sounds like early color screens are bad
-needs to be tri-mode (or dual mode at minimum)
-accessories need to be available from day one (cases, batteries, etc. kyocera missed the mark with accessory items)

RE: SPH-I300

I.M. Anonymous @ 6/8/2001 5:18:25 PM #

Here are the phones specs.

http://www.nwfusion.com/research/phones.html#samsungsph

It appears to be dual band.

---knowitall

RE: SPH-I300

I.M. Anonymous @ 6/8/2001 7:12:37 PM #

Does anyone know if Sprint is going to be carrying this phone? I haven't heard anything about it but the blown up picture of the phone has the Spring PCS logo on it.

Thanks