Idea for an app - Android Software Development

I love my old Pronto universal remote. It does everything I want. However, there is one thing about it I don't like. The resolution and color depth are poor by modern standards. The resolution is 320 x 240 (113 DPI), with only 256 colors, compared with 16 million colors and a 441 DPI pixel density for my Galaxy S4. It makes a huge difference. Since the S4 has a built in IR blaster, and even has an app (Watchon) capable of doing some of the things a Pronto can do, I'd like to suggest the creation of an app that emulates the Pronto (similar to the emulator for the HP48).

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Type of display?

I've been doing some research, and not even the official spec sheet from Motorola mention what type of display the XOOM has other than "10.1” 1280x800 resolution" and "HD widescreen display".. AMOLED? IPS? Comparable to the iPad? I haven't seen any comments on the the quality of the display either.. like.. at all.. I'm very curious.
Very important feature you know, seeing as you are going to be staring at it do everything.
From a couple videos I have seen (purely speculation) it does not look to be amoled. If I had to guess I would say lcd like the ipad. From owning both a amoled (captivate) and a lcd (galaxy tab) both are nice but I prefer the amoled.
Sent from my SPH-P100 using XDA App
It's a TFT LCD touchscreen, WXGA (1280 x 800), 160DPI, 720p HD with 16:9 aspect ratio
I believe I also saw that Moto is using Gorilla Glass for the screen as well.
Darn, a transflective lcd would be the killer thing.... *sigh*
Its a 16:10 display not 16:9
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App
So, we heard from our source that the iPad 2 would have a "super high resolution" Retina Display, we heard from AppleInsider that the iPad 2 is getting around 4X the graphics performance of the iPad, and of course there's the fact that the iPhone 4's Retina Display offered a pretty impressively painless upgrade path for developers -- an iPad 2 with a 2048 x 1536 screen is starting to sound less and less like the crazy dream of naive fanboys. But wait, there's more! A .png has been found in the iBooks 1.2 source files, dubbed Wood [email protected]. It's sized at 1536 x 800, while the old and busted Wood Tile.png in iBooks 1.1 was 768 x 400 -- that's 2X in each direction, or 4X the pixels, for anyone who's counting. Incontrovertible evidence? No, but we want to believe.
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http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/17/ipad-2-retina-display-evidence-mounts-this-time-a-png-of-wood/
Compare the two if this ipad 2 rumor is true?
Bukem75 said:
Compare the two if this ipad 2 rumor is true?
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Most likely not true. The only displays sporting something close to that (WQXGA, since QXGA with 4:3 aspect ratios pretty much died off) are 27"-30" graphics professional monitors and will run you well over $1,000. I doubt they could shrink it down to tablet-sized, or at the very least make it cost-effective.

App Compatibility?

The resolution of the Atrix is 960 x 540 which is higher than the usual standard 800 x 480 of most phones and apps are designed for this resolution. So will apps just be slightly upscaled to fit the phone?
I could be wrong, but I believe apps are *supposed* to be designed to resolution independence. There are many phones that have screens smaller than 480x800 and there are the Droids that are 480x854, and there aren't issues with compatibility unless they're poorly written.
Right. Unlike with iPhones, properly coded Android apps adapt to many different screens.
You can read the technical details in Google's documentation here:
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
also don't forget it's supposed to be Pentile matrix
Pentile won't show up to the apps though, the subpixel calculations will be handled at the hardware level.
jordan3652 said:
The resolution of the Atrix is 960 x 540 which is higher than the usual standard 800 x 480 of most phones and apps are designed for this resolution. So will apps just be slightly upscaled to fit the phone?
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If it is anything like the galaxy tab, it will be hit or miss. Most of the apps I run on my tab are scaled up to fit the whole screen, while others are not.

2 questions

Sorry if they have been answered already or obvious. Firstly, as the display has such a high pixel density, will apps have display issues unless they are optimised (as was the case with the retina display)?
Secondly, are there/ will there be games optimised for the GPU/processor as has been the case with Tegra?
Thanks.
1. Android doesn't care about specific screen resolutions. It just scales the app according to your aspect ratio and resolution. The added pixels (compared to the S3) are to display the on-screen keys. If those are hidden, you might have 48 (out of 768) lines of black bar if the app is not optimized for the screen ratio, hence no big deal.
2. Only time will tell, but why shouldn't there be optimized apps if it sells well enough (-> widespread, otherwise it's too much effort for too little benefit) and if the benefits are as big as for tegra devices?

Galaxy S4 mini

Samsung annonced officially, the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini.
it has 4.3" qHD disply, android 4.2.2 but with out most of the features of S4 (like no double shot, no 360 panorama), has S Health but with out S4 sensors like temperature sensor, barometer and humidity sensor
chipset is most likely Snapdragon 400 at 1.7Ghz with 1.5Gb of RAM and internal storage is 8Gb with Micro SD card slot for expanding it.
rest of connectivity options and usual, wifi, bluetooth,GPS with GLONASS etc...
also has IR blaster for remote controlling.
the phone has dimensions of 124.6 x 61.3 x 8.94mm and weighs 107g which is cool
battery is user replacable and is 1900mAh.
no word on pricing. samsung will show it off on June 20 and most likely to reveal pricing then.
available color options are Black Mist and White Frost.
i kinda like it except the qHD screen. it should have been at least 720p but all its success depends on its pricing.
what do u guys think?
The SIII Mini always struck me as a bit pointless, having neither the spec to appeal to those that like phones with a bit of muscle or the price point for those that want a decent phone on a budget. It didn't really satisfy anyone and I have a sneaky feeling we're going to see more of the same with this.
Definitely not more of the same, but then the s3 mini was especially useless. Rumors/leaks have the ATT version of the s4 mini at 720p (presumably pentile, but no confirmation). But gsmarena just confirmed that the version announced for europe is NOT pentile. It's got the same RGB s stripe as the Note 2. At 4.25" with qHD, it has a very respectable 259ppi that is at least as sharp as a Galaxy S3, and maybe slightly sharper. I'd almost as soon have RGB qHD as 720p pentile, so at least I know for sure what I'm getting. It comes with air view and multiwindow, which is kinda surprising.
http://www.androidbeat.com/2013/05/gs4-mini-720p/
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s4_mini-review-932.php
If this is $300, I'm gonna be very happy. If $350, I'm gonna be a little happy. If $400, I'm gonna be not very happy, but might get it anyway.
fortunz said:
Definitely not more of the same, but then the s3 mini was especially useless. Rumors/leaks have the ATT version of the s4 mini at 720p (presumably pentile, but no confirmation). But gsmarena just confirmed that the version announced for europe is NOT pentile. It's got the same RGB s stripe as the Note 2. At 4.25" with qHD, it has a very respectable 259ppi that is at least as sharp as a Galaxy S3, and maybe slightly sharper. I'd almost as soon have RGB qHD as 720p pentile, so at least I know for sure what I'm getting. It comes with air view and multiwindow, which is kinda surprising.
http://www.androidbeat.com/2013/05/gs4-mini-720p/
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s4_mini-review-932.php
If this is $300, I'm gonna be very happy. If $350, I'm gonna be a little happy. If $400, I'm gonna be not very happy, but might get it anyway.
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I saw it in a video (closely), and it's not as sharp as S3.
I don't know but it's clueless to compare the number of subpixels to say which is sharper.
With the lower ppi, Note 2 is still a little bit sharper than S3 because they scale it the same as S3 (by adjusting ppi) and no pentile effect on Note 2. But they cannot do the same on a smaller screen like S4 mini-
hung2900 said:
I saw it in a video (closely), and it's not as sharp as S3.
I don't know but it's clueless to compare the number of subpixels to say which is sharper.
With the lower ppi, Note 2 is still a little bit sharper than S3 because they scale it the same as S3 (by adjusting ppi) and no pentile effect on Note 2. But they cannot do the same on a smaller screen like S4 mini-
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It's clueless to think you can make a screen sharper through scaling (presumably, you meant adjusting "dpi"). And to claim subpixels have nothing to do with sharpness but still hail the Note 2's lack of a pentile effect as responsible for it's sharpness. What do you think the pentile effect is? And to think you can divine screen sharpness through an encoded web video. Trust me, you can't.
You can pixelate software elements through improper scaling, but you can't sharpen a low density screen through software scaling. For example if you zoom in enough (a form of 'scaling') on a small image even viewing it on a super sharp screen, yeah, it'll look bad, but that's not the screen's problem. If you've got a low density screen, the sharpest of images will look crappy no matter how you scale them. The S4 mini is sharp for the same reason the Note 2 looks sharp: because they share the same complete RGB matrix and almost the same density.
Pentile is nothing more or less than false advertising, a way of artificially inflating the raw spec. It's not the worst thing in the world, it just requires a much higher purported ppi to reach the same sharpness as an RGB matrix screen.
Again like the S3 mini, Samsung is trying to milk more money out of the S4 series but now targeting the mid-range side. Average consumers will probably buy this as there is an "S4" tag on it and is much cheaper than it's big brother.
fortunz said:
It's clueless to think you can make a screen sharper through scaling (presumably, you meant adjusting "dpi"). And to claim subpixels have nothing to do with sharpness but still hail the Note 2's lack of a pentile effect as responsible for it's sharpness. What do you think the pentile effect is? And to think you can divine screen sharpness through an encoded web video. Trust me, you can't.
You can pixelate software elements through improper scaling, but you can't sharpen a low density screen through software scaling. For example if you zoom in enough (a form of 'scaling') on a small image even viewing it on a super sharp screen, yeah, it'll look bad, but that's not the screen's problem. If you've got a low density screen, the sharpest of images will look crappy no matter how you scale them. The S4 mini is sharp for the same reason the Note 2 looks sharp: because they share the same complete RGB matrix and almost the same density.
Pentile is nothing more or less than false advertising, a way of artificially inflating the raw spec. It's not the worst thing in the world, it just requires a much higher purported ppi to reach the same sharpness as an RGB matrix screen.
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I don't think you understand my opinion, maybe due to my bad English. To say clearer, what I mean is the Note 2's screen's scale is basically the same as Galaxy S3 with the same 320 dpi - zooming from 4.8 to 5.55 inch. This means, a same font of texts, a word with a length of 120 pixels on S3 (1/6 of the total length) is still 120 pixels on Note 2 (also 1/6 of the total length), but 15.625% bigger in real-size (what you actually see). So is the result is what you can see clear on S3, you can see it CLEARER on Note 2. That's is the technichque Samsung usually implements, like on Note 8.0 that make it much more sharper than iPad mini in browsing. If we compare a same line of texts with 5mm of "real size", the result from a screen like One X basically has 18% more pixels to illustrate the detail of the text, which results in being clearer than Note 2. And if you really have a Note 2 (i'm using it), when visiting some websites in desktop mode (like xda forum, lol), the text is very small and not crisp anymore.
But how about Galaxy S4 Mini? "The S4 mini is sharp for the same reason the Note 2 looks sharp"? OK, now we will consider the same thing as Note 2 above. For a line of texts equivalent to 1/6 total length of the screen, it takes only 93.33 pixels, which means noticeably less than S3 and Note 2 with smaller "real size" also, so it cannot be as sharp as S3. And in fact, Samsung did rescale from 320dpi to 240 dpi on Galaxy S4 Mini, which also means for a same font of texts, the number of pixels for displaying increases about 15.3%, so from 93.33 pixels I said above now it is appox. 108 pixels, which is not too far from Galaxy S3, and the payoff is the screen is cramped. So we cannot say "because Note 2 is sharp so Galaxy S4 Mini is also sharp"
About Pentile screen, it is not totally "nothing more or less than false advertising", but more like "false understanding of the major and the misleading criticisms". Why? Because most of people don't understand what is "Pentile". In fact, this "technology" can ONLY be used on OLED (AMOLED) technogy, which has the uneven luminance and lumious time of different color subpixels. Even experts cannot show the "exactly" ppi of an Pentile Amoled screen (because even with Pentile, different stripes layout leads to different result), while some people try to do an easier way that comparing the total number of subpixels, which is totally false. In fact, Galaxy S4 has 623 subpixels/inch, slightly higher than Blackberry Z10 (615) and iPhone 5 (565), but it is MUCH more sharper and not really different from the normal RGB 1080p screen like Xperia Z.
With Pentile screen, the main culprit of all criticism is not the lack of subpixels, but the uneven scale of pixels (because they're not real pixels) and uneven big-small gaps redundant. That's why they call the subpixels layout of S4 is innovative while still Pentile, because it is much much better than the traditional matrix on Galaxy S3 and together with the high ppi reduces most of Pentile problem (in fact, with traditional matrix, even with 441 ppi probably there will be something there)
Does or can S4 Mini have stock or by a custom rom have Air & Motion gestures ??
AndyTimE said:
Does or can S4 Mini have stock or by a custom rom have Air & Motion gestures ??
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No, the sensor isn't there.
i wish this could be my next phone
I'm considering this too as my next phone.
Compact, powerful, enough RAM and a non-pentile qHD display.
mpokwsths said:
I'm considering this too as my next phone.
Compact, powerful, enough RAM and a non-pentile qHD display.
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It was recently announced that CM10.1 is being prepared for i9195 version. Is there any info of whether it will also be supported for i9190 international version (without LTE and NFC)?
I also suppose we need a separate ROOT thread for it as nor 9192 neither 9195 procedures might fit.
mpokwsths said:
I'm considering this too as my next phone.
Compact, powerful, enough RAM and a non-pentile qHD display.
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Me too
But only if i will find it around to 300€ in next months, and if there will be a good support on XDA
Hi Is there usb otg on galaxy s4 mini ?
KaptanJack026 said:
Hi Is there usb otg on galaxy s4 mini ?
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Not at the moment. MHL isn't supported either.
metaxaos said:
It was recently announced that CM10.1 is being prepared for i9195 version. Is there any info of whether it will also be supported for i9190 international version (without LTE and NFC)?
I also suppose we need a separate ROOT thread for it as nor 9192 neither 9195 procedures might fit.
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Click to collapse
No info. There isn't a root for the 9190 yet - the 9192 and 9195 procedures do not work on the 9190 and will probably brick your device.
hello, does anyone know when this phone will be available in the usa? can not find any info on this
if this is in the wrong forum please move, thanks
Which phone should i buy? sIII or s4 mini
Get the S4 mini if you want to future-proof yourself.
The S3 mini specifications are quite outdated
Whosat said:
Get the S4 mini if you want to future-proof yourself.
The S3 mini specifications are quite outdated
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No, i said between the normal s3 4.7" and s4mini. S3is cheaper here and has more ROMs and development
soraxx said:
No, i said between the normal s3 4.7" and s4mini. S3is cheaper here and has more ROMs and development
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Hmm, you've mentioned the main benefit of getting the S3 I guess.
Also, the S3 has quad-core as opposed to the dual-core S4 mini. S3 has 1 GB of ram only though.
There are also more accessories for the S3 than for the S4 mini because the mini has a smaller market and is also a newer device.

Is PPI dependence on CPU

hey guy, i have a strange question but i bet with some guy that more PPI dependence by CPU strength and screen resolution, or not(??).
what i said that's more power of CPU, then more PPI u can get.(ofcourse the bet is about the Adreno 300)
can you explain me about that more if im right or not? :cyclops:
PPI is about the screen, how the screen is manufactured. Dimensions in pixels is dependent of processing power,CPU if software rasterizing, CPU+GPU if hardware rasterizer.
So a phone with 1080p and 300ppi performs the same as a phone with 1080p and 1000ppi
i think that its not ppi, but resolution is the blood sucker. more resolution, more details,more computing power. which demands greater cpu and gpu powers. and let me clear, large screen size does not necessarily mean greater resolutions. compare s4/z/one with some other devices like grand/mega etc.
also if a device have good resolution and better screen it should use more ppi, which in turn supports ur argument.
Sent from my NexusHD2 using xda premium
icecore said:
hey guy, i have a strange question but i bet with some guy that more PPI dependence by CPU strength and screen resolution, or not(??).
what i said that's more power of CPU, then more PPI u can get.(ofcourse the bet is about the Adreno 300)
can you explain me about that more if im right or not? :cyclops:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
PPI stands for pixels-per-inch. Pixels per inch is not the number of pixels; it's how crammed they are together. Resolution is the number of pixels. For example, even though the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2 have the same resolution screen (ignore the fact that the S3's is pentile), the Galaxy S3 has a higher PPI because it has the pixels crammed into a smaller screen size (4.7 inch vs 5.5 inch). If the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2 had the same processor, RAM, etc, and only the screen size was different, they would perform identically. They both have the same amount of pixels, but the Galaxy S3 screen looks sharper because the screen is smaller.
What strains the processor is a higher resolution, not directly a high PPI. It's the same thing with a computer; if I run Crysis at 640 x 480 (the lowest possible resolution), I'll probably get an amazing frame rate (smoothness) even though the picture will look like crap. Why? The processor and graphics card have to process less pixels to display on the screen. Now, if I ran the game at 1080p, the frame rate would suffer dramatically, but the picture quality would look amazing. The processor and graphics card now have a LOT more to display on the screen. That's the gist of it.
got it thanks for all replays!

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