Screen Resolution in Android: Software, Hardware, both?

[Hook]

At the outset, let me establish that I'm not very knowlegable at the technical end, which is why I'm posting this question.

I know that ICS is supposed to increase options for screen resolution to allow higher screen resolutions. My question is, to what degree can it do that in software and/or what Gingerbread models already have the hardware to take advantage of it.

The reason for my question is I would likely to know how likely it is the 5 inch Samsung Galaxy Player, which has Gingerbread, if it were to get ICS (or have a CyanogenMod variant flashed), would be able to take advantage of much higher screen resolutions.

I want to know this because of my decision to not pay full price for an unlocked phone (e.g. $700 for a Galaxy Nexus) when I hardly use the phone or data. That severely limits my choices. Thus, if they don't end up offering an ICS Galaxy Player (I'm not probably purchasing for months, so in fact I hope they will), could I still get higher resolution off the current model's hardware.

My Nexus one is doing fine and Cyanogen is toying with making CM9 available for it, so this is just gathering data for long range planning.

[Radon222]

Hook,

Its not so much changing the screen resolution..and 800x400 pixel LCD screen is going to be 800x400 pixels no matter what. What you can play with is LCD Density. The effect of which will be to make objects on your screen appear larger or smaller and can you more room for rows/columns of app short cuts etc.

Your Nexus is rooted right? You can play it right now by either downloading LCD Density for Root https://market.android.com/details?i...ddensity&hl=en
from the app market

or just by manually editing your build.prop file.

How to Change Screen Density (DPI) on Android

Its worth playing around because some apps don't work so well as different dpi settings.

[Hook]

Hook,

Its not so much changing the screen resolution..and 800x400 pixel LCD screen is going to be 800x400 pixels no matter what. What you can play with is LCD Density. The effect of which will be to make objects on your screen appear larger or smaller and can you more room for rows/columns of app short cuts etc.

Your Nexus is rooted right? You can play it right now by either downloading LCD Density for Root https://market.android.com/details?i...ddensity&hl=en
from the app market

or just by manually editing your build.prop file.

How to Change Screen Density (DPI) on Android

Its worth playing around because some apps don't work so well as different dpi settings.

Cool information. Thanks. I'll have to play around with that.

I don't really need/want to change the screen resolution on my Nexus One, but if I have a 5" screen...

[jigwashere]

Thanks for the posts, Hook and Radon222. Screen or display resolution is something that I find confusing, so I looked up the Wikipedia article. I'm still confused, but perhaps not as much.

[Varjak]

Radon, that DPI link seems counterintuitive. How does lowering the DPI INCREASE density? Isn't density more dots-per-inch? In any event, I don't think this really changes the resolution of the screen, it just changes how it's deployed. The newer, true 720p display on something like the Galaxy Nexus has a much higher DPI, which could be LOWERED, resulting in bigger images, but that's about it. I'm curious to hear more though, because I might be misunderstanding this.

[Radon222]

I think the issue is that the value that gets changed is more of a dot size instead of a metric for the number of dots per unit area. That's why setting it lower makes images
appear smaller. When I had my HD2 and was running android off an sd card I could set it to 180 and have enough room on a home screen for a grid of app shortcuts at 6x6 or even almost 7x7. Using ADW launcher that is.

[internetpilot]

Hook, you can mess around with density via that 10-cent copy of ADWLauncher EX.

[Hook]

Hook, you can mess around with density via that 10-cent copy of ADWLauncher EX.

Yeah, but I have to pull it out of my app drawer first.

Still, that isn't really my question. My question is a much simpler one. The Galaxy Nexus has 1280 by 720 resolution. Is that because of it's hardware, and ICS supports having that hardware, or is it because of ICS's new capabilities. Would the Galaxy Player need different screen hardware/graphics hardware to do 1280 by 720? I suspect so.

Or can this higher resolution actually be simulated playing around with pixel density?

[SGosnell]

The max resolution is set by the hardware, but you can set the display to a lower resolution through software.

[weegie]

Agreed, reducing resolution from the LCD hardware's native res uses interpolation and everything looks pretty darned ugly tbh, hard to imagine going the other way wouldn't result in anything but even lower degrees of visual quality.

I'd be interested to know if the affect on RGB and particularly pentile matrix was even worse, you would think so as there's already a fair bit of complex algorithm and guesswork going on with sub pixel rendering, but would like to hear if anybody knows for sure, maybe the pentile screens end up with messed up colour as well as image clarity by running them at non native resolution?