Picture Perfect: Sharp's GX-20

Sharp GX-20 I first heard of the of the Sharp GX-20 from Eldar of Mobile-Review.com in March. Eldar, Sean, and I were having lunch in Hannover at the CeBIT press center. I hadn't heard of it before, and Sharp didn't have it on display. Eldar just told me to ask for a particular person, and tell them I would like to see the GX-20.

Which is what I did.

You could tell that some of the people working the Sharp booth had no idea what the GX-20 was, but when I got to the right person, he walked me over to a locked cabinet, opened it up, and pulled out an early prototype. The prototype barely functioned. The menu system didn't work. The phone couldn't make or take calls. It just had a display that was showing a series of photos. But oh, what a display it had. I had not seen anything like it before, and nothing since. 240x320 pixels of pure heaven!

6 months have passed, and I have finally had the chance to test a real production unit. I am still in awe of the display. I only had about 24 hours to do this review, though, so please forgive me if some of your questions go unanswered.

A sharp display, no pun intended

I've never been a big proponent of color displays on phones. While I do think they add to the usability of the user interface to some degree, and surely allow for more user customization, I don't think they are worth the extra battery drain. I also think that the current breed of camera phones take poor photos, which look even worse on the relatively poor displays that are on even the best of phones these days.

But it all changes here. The GX-20's display is simply brilliant. It has the same number of pixels as the standard PocketPC handheld, having a resolution of 240x320. But unlike those devices, the actual pixels are much smaller, meaning that we have the same resolution as those devices in the same basic amount of space as a typical high-end color phone display. This means the lines are very sharp, clear. Diagonal lines look like lines, not jagged little steps.

The effect is not unlike that which you get by running a high resolution on a PC. The user interface elements all look smooth and precise. They look "real."

But resolution alone doesn't make for a great display; it has to be well lit and the colors have to be realistic. Once again, this is what Sharp has provided. The lighting of the display is very even, and the colors are simply outstanding. Sometimes the display looks so good when photographed that the images look fake, as was the case with the early CeBIT photos I took. The images have the look you would expect from some corporate marketing department that has doctored up a bunch of photos in Photoshop for a press release. It really is that good.

But not perfect. My review unit had a stuck pixel. One pixel located near the center of the display that was always a bright cyan kind of color. That is one of the problems with high resolution displays with very fine pixels - they are harder to get perfect. The imperfection rate is higher than with simpler displays. But with all that said, I only noticed the stuck pixel a few times, and mostly because I was looking for it.

As is common with folder design phones, the Sharp GX-20 has an external sub-display that displays (hopefully) useful information to the user without them having to open the phone. The sub-display on the GX-20 is pretty good. It is easy to read, and provides a lot of information. Including the time, but we'll get to that later.

 

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