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[Hajo]

What do you expect to be common display resolutions of mobile devices in the near future? (One or two years from now)

[Don Andy]

What do you expect to be common display resolutions of mobile devices in the near future? (One or two years from now)

Probably the same as today. I mean, in the end they're supposed to be MOBILE devices, so the whole iPhone think, where the screen also serves for input (so the whole device can be plastered with screen, basically), is probably as big as it'll get.

Sure, you can probably take a device the size of a PSP and plaster that completely with touch screen technology, but I probably wouldn't buy that as a phone.

Given that we're actually talking about mobile phones/smartphones here.

But if you mean Handhelds I guess it'd probably stay around PSP level, too. There is only so much screen you actually need on a mobile device, even for games.

And notebooks would be a whole other thing again.

[Hajo]

Higher resolution doesn't immediately mean bigger displays. I don't expect that the displays grow in size, but I could imagine that a display that nowadays shows 320x240 pixels (or whatever is common) will show 640x480 in two years on the same size? Of course that will mean to have bigger fonts, to keep them readable, but graphics could be more detailed on such displays, that's why I think we'll see higher resolutions there in the future.

[muku]

I think the grand goal is having 600 dpi resolution on any display: desktop, laptop, mobile, whatever, because then you can have fonts that look as good and are as readable as those in print. I guess that's quite some time off from now though.

[increpare]

There's also the ideal of having everything resolution independent ... but google have more or less abandoned that idea for android, and I don't really see it as being too popular or powerful a paradigm on today's technology.  Maybe in the future, but it'll probably be more than two years away... (at least for handheld devices)

[Hajo]

Thank you for the replies. I think then it will be best if I design for the higher of the current resolution, in case I have something resolution dependant. I'm used to work with pixeled tile-based graphics and those looks best at a 1:1 pixel mapping for display.

[muku]

Maybe in that case it would be better to design at a lower resolution and scale up if your render target has a higher resolution? For pixel art that tends to work well.

[Hajo]

Upscaled pixel art tends to look good on factors like 2, gets a distinct retro-feel there But broken factors like 1.5 use to give a mess in my experience ... if there are tricks how to make those look good too, I'm highly interested

[muku]

Uh, no, I was thinking of integer factors. I don't think it's possible to keep the crisp pixel look without compromises for non-integer scaling.

But on the other hand, if you now work at the higher resolution and scale down for the lower resolution later, you have much the same problem. Actually, I think downscaling looks even worse because you lose details and often end up with a bludgeoned mess of pixels.