I'm hoping that the technology behind these insane hires screens will make 1280x800 5" screens cheaper and better. As well as the availability of low-power CPU/GPUs that can deal with those high resolutions. I really don't need that insane amount of ppi on the Pandora 2, but it would be nice if it had full HD hdmi output and enough horsepower to decode movies at that resolution. But the screen itself should be a tradeoff between availability, quality, power consumption, and price - not just the highest possible resolution. I don't want to pay for pixels I can't see, and I certainly don't want those nanopixels to affect my battery life or cpu/gpu performance, and make me have to reconfigure everything to use way bigger font sizes because otherwise I can't read anything.
CPU load doesn't usually scale much with resolution unless you're stuck soft rendering the whole thing, so you don't really have to worry about that. Memory bandwidth should be both much higher - going from MDDR to at least LPDDR2 or DDR3 with clocks at least twice as high and two channels instead of one - and more accessible with improved SoC buses and better CPU latency hiding. Increased demands on space for framebuffer/backbuffer for 2D is absolutely piddly compared to the overall increase in RAM the device will have.
Soft rendering or mostly soft rendering is typically what you do in desktop stuff (file management, office stuff, browsers etc), and this is also the kind of stuff you really want to do at the native resolution because it involves lots of text in relatively small fonts that will degrade with scaling.
I agree that the increase in RAM use and bus bandwidth is not gonna cause problems, but then again, I wouldn't count on the P2 to have 8GB of RAM, imo a more realistic number would be 1 or 2 GB. A doublebuffer framebuffer is still only 16MB at full HD, so it's certainly not problematic, but it is more than the 3MB it currently takes on the Pandora 1.
Hardware video decode for 1080p30 with normal h.264 profiles is standard even on pretty low end Chinese SoCs these days. I wouldn't worry about that one either. And mobile GPUs have gotten faster at a much quicker pace than even CPUs have. The 200MHz SGX530 on the 1GHz Pandoras is very weak compared to what even an OMAP5 will have (2x SGX543MP2 @ 500MHz or so afaik), which will probably not be especially high end compared to what other SoCs are offering. We're talking 2-8 times more power per core per clock, 2.5x more clock speed, and 2x more cores, for 10-40x more power. Of course, 3D doesn't need to use the full resolution, and it doesn't really look as bad with non-integer scaling. Especially if you can get a high quality filter on it.
So I don't think driving 1080p content will necessarily be a huge challenge, which is good, because regardless of whether or not it has a 1080p screen it IS nice to be able to put 1080p content out over HDMI.
I agree that it would be nice to get 1080p output over HDMI, and that it should not be a huge challenge to find hardware that can do that (esp. since those phones will be able to do it). But I don't think the small screen should be at that resolution, because it's pointless to make the resolution that much better than what the human eye can see, and because we want a battery life that is better than that of those phones. Less pixels will mean better battery life, mostly because the screen itself will need less power.
This would all not be such a big problem if it was easy to put the display in an arbitrary lower resolution. But that's impossible with LCD: unless you use some integer fraction, it will look blurred. So what are the options for 1920x1080? You could double the pixels and get 960x540, which is a rather awkward resolution because most things are designed for 480 or 600 lines (or multiples of 240 or 200 in general). You could triple the pixels and get 640x360, which is lower res than the Pandora 1 and not enough for VGA. None of these downscaled resolutions are particularly useful, especially not for things like retro emulation.
It's not like you'd use the same resolution for everything. Most emulators will use scaling no matter what the native resolution is. Here are some common heights for emulators: 144, 160, 192, 224, 240, 480. Most of these will scale to about 11.11% of the screen height unused, with 224 hitting worst at 17%. Compare with 720p, where you get hit really bad with 480 resolution (33% black space) and somewhat bad with 192 (20%). Sure, 800p is great for the resolutions you listed and it's the best for the ones I listed too - except 480p, where it's the worst. But if you can stand a little clipping or non-integer scaling that might not be that awful.
Yes, and of course for emulation it would be better to have a 4:3 aspect ratio, say 1280x960. But that's probably impossible to find. I prefer 16:10 (1280x800) to 16:9 (HD or Full HD) though, because that's at least a bit closer to 16:12.
Also, Craig has hinted at plans to make SOC upgrades in the P2 possible with some kind of modularity, - if the P2 is going to have an extended sales lifespan and upgradeable processor(s) 1080p is a good plan - even if used with pixel doubling half the time.
One of the problems the P1 has atm is people looking at numerical specs and concluding that its useless. Just imagine the iPhone 7S with a WQXGA screen next to a P2 with a 'mere' WXGA.
Its a really stupid comparison to make, but it doesn't look good
The P2 specs will be outdated for those number fetishists 6 months after its release anyway. We should have good specs where it matters. Our target audience should be people who actually understand what the numbers mean, not people who just want something with the biggest numbers. Sure, we could put in 16 cores at 4GHz each, that would burn a hole in your hand and explode the battery if you would have software that actually uses them all, just to make the specs look good, but let's not do that kind of stuff.
