iPhone Screen Readability

[milhous]

There's no doubt that the iPhone has a sweet high-resolution screen. But what I'm curious about is how legible a full page site actually looks like when holding the iPhone vertically.

In other words, if you look at the commercials and see the user access the New York Times website, is the text of all six columns on the page actually readable without zooming? I can't seem to tell even after scrubbing through the clips frame by frame.

If that's the case, than that's just freakin' sweet!

 

[0007776]

I don't think that anyone knows that at this point.

 

[Gonzlobo]

One of the useless reviews I read made an interesting comment: How is it typing in the bright sunshine?

Since one can't type tactically, you'll have to turn up the brightness just to see the keys (which will of course reduce battery life). Seems like a legit squawk, but I never use my laptop outdoors where the screen washes out the display. I will, however, need to see the number pad to dial new phone numbers.

 

[Fredo521]

I just want to know how good the screen is in direct sunlight, something my razr is unreadable in. The PSP also has this problem, badly. Actually, most displays have this problem, no?

 

[NewtypeCJ]

I would hope that the ambient light sensor included on the iPhone would help with this problem. Hopefully it'll work pretty well. I'd rather not have to adjust the brightness at all, if I can help it.

 

[kdarling]

Sunlight readability is best with transflective LCDs. No idea what the iPhone has. Probably not, if they don't mention it.

As for reading the full Times page without zooming... nope. In landscape mode, you only have 480 dots across. That's a little over two columns' worth if zoomed into small 5x7 characters.

As pointed out before, the demos seem to carefully choose sites with relatively small column widths, whenever they wanted to show the zoom. This was so you'd remember being able to read an entire line of text without having to scroll sideways back and forth... which is a very annoying way to surf.

Most sites are probably not made up of small columns. This forum here, for example, would be painful to use on the iPhone. Zooming in and out to see where you are on a page, and then having to scroll sideways while reading, will not be lots of fun after the first week.

 

[kamiboy]

I think the commercials are mock-ups. Why? Because flash is shown to be working on the New York Times page. So either it was a mock-up made from recording Safari running one a real Mac or they were using a prototype that had partially working flash. For various reasons I am going to go with the mock-up theory.

 

[sammich]

I think the commercials are mock-ups. Why? Because flash is shown to be working on the New York Times page. So either it was a mock-up made from recording Safari running one a real Mac or they were using a prototype that had partially working flash. For various reasons I am going to go with the mock-up theory.

Perhaps they modified all of the content in the webpages, converted the flash elements into non-interactive h.264 videos. Loaded it onto a local server, then pointed the iPhone there.

Just like all of the youtube videos currently beeing converted to h.264 for use with the AppleTV.

 

[killerrobot]

I'm still curious as to how they even got to the webpage on the commercials? (Yeah, I know they typed it somehow, but why didn't they show that) It's already up and running as far as I can remember. What flash did they have running on the NYT page? I only remember seeing colorful text and them panning the screen. Man I guess I have to watch the commercials again.

And I couldn't read the text without them zooming in on the commercial, but who knows what it's really going to be like.

 

[kamiboy]

In the commercial the browser was already open and the page fully loaded running in the background. All the disembodied hand did was push the browser button to bring the browser to the foreground.

 

[killmoms]

Here's a good way to figure out how the text will look if you have Photoshop (or some other image utility capable of resizing.

1) Go to the New York Times home page in Safari. Resize Safari so you
2) Take a screenshot (Cmd+Shift+4, space, hover over Safari and click).
3) Resize the picture to 320px wide.

To help, I've just done this. See attachment.

Short answer: Headlines? Some. Body copy? No. Which is why it has zooming.