Dean Bubley: High-res screens for mobiles

Dean Bubley writes about higeher-resolution handset screens at the Disruptive Wireless blog. He writes that at 3GMS "the coolest piece of tech I saw was Toshiba's tiny, cellphone-sized 2.4-inch screen - capable of full VGA (640x480 pixels) resolution. Epson had a similar, slightly-larger version."

Bubley thinks "this is what mobile TV, viewing pictures and other applications needs," and that "high-end phones in Japan should start to ship with VGA screens towards the end of the year."

Bubley opines that "the growth curves of undrelying handset capabilities - screen, processor, memory - are outstripping the ability of wireless networks to exploit them fully. He states:

A VGA screen needs 4 times more data than a QVGA (320x240) one. Add in an iPod's-worth of flash memory, and again the cellular network won't be able to fill it up effectively. Yes, HSDPA and EV-DO are fast, but the backhaul is still a bottleneck. Net result? Yet more reasons to bypass the network, using WiFi, USB, Bluetooth, UWB or removable memory cards instead.