Will Apollo bring HD screen support to Windows Phone?

October 19, 2011 | By Surur

Perennial leaker MS_Nerd is spreading some rumours this morning about the upcoming versions of Windows Phone.

According to his tweets Tango will not just add support for low-end handsets with HVGA screens, but also for high end features like LTE which is in high demand by carriers.

For the next version of Windows Phone code named Apollo things will go even more high-end, with support for HD screens with 1280×720 resolution and also dual core processors.

Of course the iPhone 5 is rumoured to be sporting a quadcore processor, so Windows Phone will still likely be seen to be behind then, but surely at some point this spec-hunting madness will end.

Of note, looking back in our archives, in January 2010 we reported on a Windows Mobile 7 device with a HD screen and 10 megapixel camera, named the LG Apollo. Maybe things had been brewing for a few years after all.

Via Pocketnow.com

About Surur

Site Admin and Windows Phone enthusiast, he has been using Windows Mobile devices since before they were called PocketPC’s. He is currently sporting a HTC 7 Trophy.

Tagged apollo, dual core, rumour, tango, windows phone

http://twitter.com/dustbeta Dustin Schultz

Well that is pretty big news indeed. Wonder what this means for devs?

Anonymous

I guess this should be ok if Devs have followed guidelines.

Homebrew native apps might have issues though.

http://fxfp.com/ Alex F.

I’m afraid there is no relevant guideline from Microsoft for this situation – most sizes in Silverlight-based apps are in pixels, thus existing apps will require updates for any resolution other than 480×800. I’m pretty sure that’s why higher resolutions support will only come in Apollo.

Anonymous

Silverlight is all vector based and scales very well (find a silverlight app and turn your browser’s zoom up!). What they should do is make sure any new resolutions have the same aspect ratio so they can scale without losing or misusing space.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=715591433 Barry Allott

That screen resolution is not the same as the current

1.666667 vs 1.77777

What will THAT do to current apps?

Anonymous

Well, we know for a fact they were planning to do HVGA, so presumably they have a solution in the wings already, hopefully an automatic one like a scaler.

Christoffer Lundberg

Scaler?? Hell no… that would look ugly as f’ck.. like those older Galaxy Tabs..

Mark Matheson

I’d imagine any non-Apollo app would be scaled to fit the screen but it will be up to each developer to decide if they want to improve graphical fidelity of their apps and release an update or leave as is.

I’d guess the upscaling would be done to fill the screen so there’d be a slight stretch of the original display, similar to turning a 4:3 TV show to 16:9. Alternatively if they kept the correct aspect ratio, the app would run at 1200×720 – You’d lose 80 pixels vertically. Either option seems perfectly acceptable to me.
Anonymous

The native UI should handle it fine, and not difficult to code either… in fact, other resolutions might already be possible, but not enabled. Metro depends on a lot of vertical scrolling, and the easiest solution would be to change the font size by percentage, depending on resolution, and just show an extra half line or so. This wouldn’t break horizontal scrolling either.

With hardware acceleration, scaling of images/icons using a decent filter shouldn’t be a problem, even with current hardware. I would imagine that devices with HD screens will also be packing more powerful GPUs, making scaling both smooth and clean looking.

The biggest problem would be with games. Stretching or letterboxing would be acceptable until they’re updated to support the new resolution, though textures MIGHT suffer a bit. Probably not too much, once again due to GPU acceleration.
Anonymous

Depends if they want to keep the 16:10 (Or very close) ratio or move to 16:9 (1280×720). Personally I wouldn’t mind seeing 1280×800 as the new res, which would almost scale perfectly with 800×480 (1.6 vs 1.66666667), but we’ll see as they say.

Anonymous

Really need Apollo for next summer and not next Autumn/Fall. As long as we keep getting 4″ high end phone I am happy.

Keep the leaks coming.
Christoffer Lundberg

Please.. do not alter the resolution. It will seriously damage every UI based app (especially games) out there…

http://twitter.com/Davidmuful David Bailey

I don’t think they will do this, unless it’s exactly double. They won’t break every app out there for spec nerds. They have already shown they don’t care about adding specs unless they bring real value, I’m sure they will support a double res panel in the future, but not 720. It would break the whole marketplace. It’s stupid. It’s very easy to just tweet that they will because android phones are. Also, the article says the iPhone 5 will have a quad core, bullshit. Apple don’t add specs unless they bring value, and they certainly won’t reduce battery life just to check a box that says quad core. Apple and MS don’t play the android spec game, and that’s why their phones are better. /rant over.

Mark Matheson

Will Apollo be Windows 8 or is that too soon?

Anonymous

Apollo is WP8 yes. Probably late summer/early fall 2012.

http://fxfp.com/ Alex F.

Development of Windows 8 has started even before Windows 7 was finished – I imagine Microsoft has a similar forward-looking plan for Windows Phone.
Jordan Zielin

screen resoltion need to be bumped up ASAP. At the end of the day the screen is what we look @ and interface with.
http://twitter.com/abhi1manyu Abhimanyu Jamwal

its a shame…..no matter how you look at it, wp7 will always be behind the curve…one year to be exact. At this rate i doubt wp7 will ever manage 10% market share…..wonder what 90000 people working for microsoft do all day if it takes one year to add support for things such as LTE, higher screen resolution or dual core….forget that, they can’t even convince the OEM’s to increase the specs from 8 Gb and 16 Gb to 32Gb and 64 Gb ….and whats microsoft have done, 4Gb with no micro DS support
Dear Microsoft, wake up..the world already moved to NFC and HD screen while you try for better bluetooth and battery life

http://twitter.com/dodgebizkit Prof. Danny Dodge

When you rush it you get unstable buggy phones (Android) and same old same old (iOS) or just plain crap that’s trying to hold on to a dying flame (BB)… MS take their sweet time, granted, but they are the first company to innovate in the mobile software world since the first iteration of iPhone, and with both the first gen and then mango releases, the other companies have been scrambling to copy MS and integrate their ideas into their own OSes…

In summary, the wait is justified.

http://josedmorales.net Josè Daniel

As long as this doesn’t introduce severe fragmentation like Android, I’m fine.
Anonymous

and the fragmentation begins

http://twitter.com/dodgebizkit Prof. Danny Dodge

The new resolutions have been announced and there will be no fragmentation.