Luke Hutchison, a self proclaimed “Android Hacker” and PhD candidate at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, loves his Nexus One, just like all us other Nexus One owners do, but his screen was not quite delivering the results he expected. Compared to the Motorola Droid, which has a similar 3.7 inch screen, but also a slightly larger 480 x 854 screen resolution, the text on his Nexus One was terribly blurry.
He investigated, and published a 3 page article on Ars.Technica detailing the PenTile matrix pixel layout of the AMOLED screen inside the Nexus One. It’s super technical, but written in a way that any layman can understand, and his thesis is this: the Nexus One doesn’t really have a 480 x 800 pixel resolution screen if you use the commonly accepted method for counting pixels; it’s actually more like a 392 x 653 pixels.
Do I love my Nexus One less after reading his piece? As the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere gets closer and closer (June 21), and the days are getting longer and longer here in Finland, I am starting to become a bit ticked off with how poorly the Nexus One performs outdoors. I’m not looking for a new device just yet, but after looking at Samsung’s Super AMOLED packing Wave at Mobile World Congress last month, and reading what Will had to say about the Samsung Galaxy S that debuted a few days ago, I’m definitely considering getting a new device by the end of this year.