TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Nokia 770 full-screen mode revealed

By Roger Sperberg

While the Nokia 770 won’t be released till Q3, e-book development has already begun.

Kernel Concepts, which ported the Plucker Viewer to the new platform, has added a full-screen mode to the software. Here are screen-captures of the Viewer running in the Maemo development platform’s virtual machine. These are the first shots of Plucker Viewer running in full-screen mode.

Using a sample section from the 9/11 Commission Report, the full-screen mode contains 216 words compared to 158 in the standard mode, considerably more text. The lines are longer, and typically a full-screen mode page displays 22 lines, compared to 19 in the standard display. (Obviously, the headlines and inter-paragraph spacing affect these counts.) This short sample of text averaged 10.6 words per line in the standard display and 12.4 in full-screen, right in the optimal reading range.

Here, via a link, is a shot of the text displayed at 800 pixels wide–the number of pixels in the Nokia 770 display. Note the three blue Plucker icons in the sidebar in the image; they represent three Plucker Viewer windows, one each for two open books and one for the Plucker library.

However, since the 770’s display is 225 pixels per inch, the viewing area will be less than four inches wide and the pixel density about five times greater than the typical 100 ppi monitor. The smaller version of this screen capture shown here won’t duplicate the readability of the type, but is a truer indicator of the display screen. (Note how many more words are shown in the full-screen small image than that of the standard display, shown at 800 pixels wide.)

And here is a page, displayed in full-screen mode and at something approximating lifesize. Click on the image to see, via a link, the full 800 pixels, and an indication of the picture quality possible. (The larger image shows the standard screen, with its smaller reading area.)

(Full disclosure: I’m one of those who has signed up in Nokia’s Developer Device Program, allowing me to purchase the device at 30 percent of the list price.)

Update, 12:03, June 29: David A. Desrosier loved Roger Sperberg’s post above. David says he’ll release “over 500 separate Plucker’ized works in low, high, non-image formats over the next few months. They’re all here locally. I just have to build the framework to sort, categorize and search them for users. It’s part of a pretty big recasting of the Plucker project I’m undertaking. Your work and screenshots on the 770 are going to help us promote that even further. As you can imagine, my day job at IBM keeps me busy, so things on that side of my day are moving slower than I want…but things are moving in a forward direction.” - David Rothman