How much?
So thats what, 6 RaspberryPI's and a screen +battery +disk
£300 ish + MS tax and legal costs fighting apple over who owns the 3 dimensions and a bit of profi
£750?
Are ten-inch tablets too small for you? Rumour has it Samsung will introduce an 11.6in Galaxy Tab during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) show next month. Details are inevitably vague. German-language site TabTech gives the screen size but doesn't provide a resolution. The Samsung tablet will run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich …
So Samsung have stretched it to 11.6", does this hail the beginning bigger tablets? I have to ask at what screen size do tablet systems cease being classified as tablets? 13" perhaps? Or is this indefinite?
Good to see the CPU's been ramped up too, right now it's a buyers market if they keep the prices realistic.
> an 11.6in screen is pushing it a bit for a handheld display
Once a device gets bigger than a convenient size to stuff in your pocket, then whether it's 10 inches, 12 or more becomes less important that how much it weighs. At those sizes (i.e. laptop-sized) it needs a bag to carry it around in, so it's lost the convenience factor. All that is up for discussion is how big the bag needs to be - and if you've got to carry a bag, why not have a proper laptop in it, instead?
So Samsung are quite happy to produce a tablet with an 11.6" screen and a crazy high resolution but their "ultra"book is limited to a paltry 1366x768 on a larger 13.3" screen.
They obviously see the need for larger resolution screens and they are producing them, how about a bit of joined up thinking to put the two together. This screen in an ultrabook would be worthy of name.
You are totally right. Why haven't the resolutions of laptop displays improved in recent years?
I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 that dates from around 2003 with a 1600x1200 screen. At the time, it was the top of the range display.
These days, pretty well only Apple make anything with a vertical size greater then 1080.
The majority of laptops on sale today seem to be 1366x768.
Perhaps this and the iPad 3's rumoured similar sized screen is a taste of things to come?
Paris because size is everything
You are exactly the problem, the manufacturers are listening to you because your opinion is cheaper. I don't think I need a 2560x1600 screen in my laptop but I do need more than 768 vertical pixels.
If the icons are too small for you you just need to set the OS dpi to match the screen dpi and the icons will be the correct size but there will be more detail available where you need it. I couldn't care less about watching HD movies on my laptop. I want resolution for editing photographs, I want it for writing code, I want it for viewing spreadsheets.
It's your lack of understanding and that of people like you that has caused this situation. Up to around 200dpi more resolution is better, beyond that it gets debatable.
What an accurate handle. Yes, I actually know how to adjust the icon size, but (to put it in terms you might be able to grasp) WHAT WOULD BE THE FUCKING POINT? If you want to edit photos, buy a great big screen with the resolution you need (you did know you can adjust the size of photos as well, I assume). Just because one person thinks they have a need for something (but probably wouldn't buy it) doesn't mean the industry has to build it. And how does higher resolution assist you to code?
If there were a huge, pent up demand for higher resolution laptop screens, I assume they would exist by now (at a price, anyway). The fact that they don't proves my point.
I had a Dell 8500 (precursor to the 8600) and that had a 1920x1200 screen, which was one of the proposed screen resolutions for HD, I think it was Sony's proposal. I first used Sony Unix workstation with this screen res back in about 1991. There were a whole host of different proposal for HDTV, I think we end up with one of the middle ones with a paltry 1080 lines.
( I could be wrong here, but I think it meant they could transmit 1 HD channel or 4 standard US channels in the same space at this res, do think that any other market matter back then, it didn't)
Now if your laptop life revolves about watching HD movies then there is probably no need to have a higher resolution. Then we have the fact that most people run MSWindows, and by default it assumes a fairly low res and so makes small icons and lots of apps' dialog boxes don't like you telling it to use non default font sizes. So it isn't always easy to use higher resolutions on smaller screens.
Personally I use my laptop frequently as a glorified terminal. I need to be able to display remote sessions which then contain further remote session (don't ask) and so anything less than 1200 lines is of no use to me. A higher resolution would be useful for this, I could more easily display more session at once.
I also find higher resolution useful when working on photos.
The one the Dell had a 15.4" screen, so 1920x1200 worked out at about 150DPI, I personally found that fine and quiet comfortable to work on. Running PuTTY, say, with 10point fonts used to be fine, but then as your forties creep past you these things become more difficult and I need my bins to work on that size now.
But doubling the screen res would allow the use of larger and therefore smoother fonts.
Old fashioned dot matrix printers were used to used to print 66 lines on a 11" fanfold paper. You could read it OK, but you'd still choose to use a 1200dpi printer if it was on the network. The results are just more pleasing on the eye. Your eyes might not be able to resolve 300DPI, but you can tell the difference between something printed at 300DPI and something printed at 600DPI.
So personally I'd choose a higher res screen.
And as soon as 2K line screens reach a more reasonable price point I'll buy them. Hopefully it won't be long now.
I'm a sad git so I'm not interested in "HD movies" and I don't use the laptop to play games, so I'm not worried at the frame rate dropping as the graphics engine runs out of power to render all those beautiful little pixels. But I am a pixel junky, and I'm yet to see an example of where I can have too many of them.
I agree except that I find 7" is also a useful size, it's the right size for reading novels as it pretty much matches the paperback form factor. It's stlll small enough to stick in a coat pocket or purse yet big enough to be useful for light web browsing, email etc. The typical 10 inch size is a poor compromise, go smaller and bigger, I'm willing to buy one of each.
@Chris Miller - I have a great big screen for "editing photos"... and code... and proofing documents... and working generally. Unfortunately most of the time I am on the road and my great big screen doesn't fit in my hand baggage. Fail. Still it's not like I need to earn money from working or anything...
Low vertical pitch screens exist because they are cheap. Cheap to produce, cheap to buy, cheap to fit. And if people want something bigger then can buy a premium product with a 1200 pixel pitch - a spec which hasn't changed appreciably in over a decade - in a drive for profit and cheap product.
If the consideration was customer experience or technology, 1200 pitch would be the minimum. But as ever we live in a world where people are willing to put up with crap products because they know no better.
Perhaps it's 'the man' sticking it to the little people again. But, given that the technology exists and that there is a market for very expensive laptops (Apple being the prime example, though many manufacturers offer a 'de luxe' range), you have to explain why no-one has thought to offer one. Is it because:
(a) too few people would be prepared to pay the extra price for what they perceive as a very limited benefit; or
(b) all manufacturers are clueless about the market requirements, despite spending millions on market research, and so risk averse that they decline the obviously profitable market that so many commentards seem to think exists?
As lots of people have pointed out, x1200 screens have been around for many years, but there aren't that many sold. So instead of all the teenaged whining of "it's so unfair", perhaps a little thought about why that might be the case is needed.