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First Impressions of the HandEra 330 Parts I-III - Page 4

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All of this is well and good, but hardly useful if all of your applications break, or if they have to be used in a really tiny window that's too small to see. What about application compatibility? The 330 detects if your application is a high resolution, 330 aware application. If it isn't, you are given three modes to run the application in: scale-to-fit, center, and upper left. Scale-to-fit makes the application fit in the full screen when the graffiti area is expanded. Center fits the application into the central 160x160 pixels, leaving a 40 pixel blank border on all sides. Upper left uses the first 160x160 pixels of the screen, leaving 80 pixels free below and 80 pixels free to the right.

Scale-to-fit is used by default and is fine for 90% or more of applications. In this mode, 160x160 pixel applications are scaled to take 240x240 pixels. The 330 uses font substitution, so fonts are smooth and very readable (and in fact, much nicer than the fonts on other Palms). Graphics can look somewhat jagged, although in most cases not to the point of being very hard to look at. Most text-heavy applications look great, graphic heavy applications and games tend to look less great, although most are eminently useable.

Some applications just don't display correctly in scale-to-fit. Most of these are fine in centered mode. Unfortunately centered mode is small enough that it is a bit difficult to read text therein. Fortunately most applications that need centered mode are graphic-intensive games. Bejeweled is one such game, and after getting used to the smallishness, I find the game very easy to play in centered mode. Everything looks incredibly crisp, and the gems are large enough that there is no problem with gameplay. The portions of the game dealing with high scores are more difficult because of the smaller size, but how much time is really spent entering or viewing high scores?

In a very few cases an application makes assumptions about specific pixel placement on the screen and must run in the first 160x160 pixels of the screen. These applications require upper left mode. Although the same size as the center mode, because it isn't centered I find it much more difficult to deal with visually. Luckily, I have only found one application that needs to use this mode, Planetarium.

Sadly, there are a few applications that simply do not work on the 330. I haven't encountered many, but I have encountered a few, all games or hacks that use silkscreen buttons for activation. The games all tend to present a flattened short image across the entire top 60 or so pixels of the screen no matter which mode you try to use them in. Three games that exhibit this behavior are Puzzles-in-Motion, Shisensho, and Mah Jongg.

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