In an unexpected turn, it appears Windows Phone 7 series is heading to the low-end after all. In a blog post Shawn Hargreaves revealed that the next supported screen resolution after WVGA will in fact be half VGA, 2.5 times less that WVGA.
He notes:
At launch, all phones will have a 480×800 (WVGA) display resolution, but we will add 320×480 (HVGA) in a future update. Of course you can detect the native resolution and program your game to adapt to this if you want, but the scaler allows games to pick just one resolution, always render at that fixed size, and still run correctly on phones with different native screen sizes. For bonus points, we automatically scale touch input to match your chosen resolution.
This does make us wonder what other “Chassis 1” specs are up for negotiation, and whether Windows Phone 7 series will also support ARM 11 chips like on the HTC HD Mini.
He goes on to say WP7s has a brand-new graphics stack “optimized from the ground up for mobile GPU hardware”. Unfortunately this new stack does not include custom shaders, to the disappointment of many developers, but hopefully this can be added in the future.
Read more at Shawn’s blog here.
Via Engadget.com
