Fonts: The most under rated smartphone feature
By Stefan Constantinescu on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 3:07 AM PST In Ideas and rants
I went to my local Fry’s (massive electronics store) today and bumped into a friend of mine. He just got a new phone, a BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Pearl.
The very first thing I noticed was how ugly his fonts were.
S60 and Palm (NSDQ: PALM) fonts have to be, hands down, the best on the market right now. When you’re staring at a device for hours everyday you kind of want things to be crisp, sharp and pleasing to the eye.
Who is the guy in charge of fonts at S60? Are we going to see any new rendering technologies in later feature packs or versions?
In general I just love the original fonts but sometimes I just feel like wanting to try another font.
On my old 6681 I installed a new set of fonts and I liked it very much, I wish the same font replacement thing would work on 3rd edition devices too. The fontguide: http://www.symbian-freak.com/tunning/fontquide/font.htm
I also had a brain fart about fonts earlier, you can check it here:
http://r200.vox.com/library/post/my-dear-n73-whats-up-with-your-fonts.html
I find Blackberry font management much more advanced than Nokia S60´s. Blackberry OS supports fonts and font sizes changes. With the Nokia you are stuck with the default (and IMHO too large)font.
That´s one of the reasons I sold my E61 and got a Blackberry 8800.
I love fonts on 3rd edition devices
As it was kinda mentioned by R2, you can change the fonts on the BB Pearl. Granted, none of them are all too different from one another, though having an option to change them at all is better than nothing. The new N-series font that was made available on all screens greater than 176×208 is still as gorgeous as it gets.