Supporting the QVGA Smartphone Home Screen

Microsoft

March 2004

Applies to:
   Windows Mobile™ 2003 Second Edition software for Smartphones

Summary: Learn about how a QVGA Smartphone 2003 Second Edition supports home screens including QVGA backgrounds, and changes to the Smartphone Home Screen XML. (2 printed pages)

Introduction
QVGA Backgrounds
Legacy Support

Windows Mobile™ 2003 Second Edition software for Smartphone can now support 240 x 320 (quarter VGA, or QVGA) resolution display, as well as the "classic" 176 x 220 resolution display. Authors of customized Home Screens should be aware of a few changes to the Smartphone Home Screen API that affect this new feature.

Note A Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition-based Smartphone supports only one resolution, that is a user cannot switch between resolutions.

On classic Smartphone, the display is 200 pixels tall, with a 20 pixel area for the soft key buttons. On QVGA Smartphone, the soft key area is expanded to 27 pixels, which leaves 293 vertical pixels for the Home Screen. Therefore, you need to resize your background images to 240 x 293 pixels in order to target QVGA Smartphone.

In addition to re-authoring your background image, you need to add the following attributes to the Default tag in the Home Screen XML file:

<default target-width="240" target-height="320">

If QVGA Smartphone cannot find these property values in the Home Screen XML file, it will assume that the home screen was authored for classic Smartphone, and will emulate a classic Smartphone display by scaling all layout coordinates and graphics upwards by 36%.

As you can see from the following calculations, this scaling factor fits a 240 x 293 screen horizontally, but not vertically:

Width:  176 pixels x 1.363 = 240 pixels
Height: 200 pixels x 1.363 = 273 pixels

As a result, there will be 20 pixels at the bottom of the QVGA Smartphone screen which will be unused. Smartphone will fill this area with the COLOR_BTNFACE color.