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 Originally Posted by CrunchDude
VGA is 640x480. What difference is there between this "realVGA" and actual VGA?
RealVGA is the name of a freeware application/hack for Windows Mobile 6. It supercedes hacks like oZVGA and TrueVGA which were around for WM5.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=327830
On a device with a VGA 640x480 screen, Windows Mobile uses pixel doubling to emulate a standard QVGA 320x240 screen. This makes most software display exactly the same as it does on QVGA, with the same sized fonts and number of lines etc., but with much smoother fonts.
Worse still, on a device with a 320x320 screen, WM "pretends" the screen is actually 240x240, so displays exactly the same info as you would see on a 240x240 screen (e.g. Treo 750, Ipaq 69xx), but with smoother fonts. Pretty pathetic really, when you consider you have a higher res screen, but can only display less information than a standard 320x240 PocketPC!
Microsoft's reason for all this is to allow you to run any WM application designed for an "old" QVGA screen, without it having to be VGA-aware. Much the same as hi-res 320x320 screens on PalmOS devices pixel-double all the menus and standard Palm applications that were written to work with the "original" 160x160 Palm Pilot screens.
The higher res does allows you to reduce the text size smaller than you would on a QVGA screen (e.g. to 6pt on the Today screen) but still be able to read it, and some applications will use the higher res mode internally if they specifically support it - but you still have to put up with the huge top and bottom status bars and OS menus / limited lines.
What the RealVGA application does is to force Windows Mobile 6 and above to dispense with the emulation and run everything at the native resolution of the screen. So on a VGA screen, all the title bars, menus and fonts are shrunk to 50%. This makes best use of the new hardware, but it also means text can be very small, as effectively you're just shrinking what people used to view on old 12-14" VGA PC monitors down to a couple of inches! This works fine on a 5 or 3.5" screen (e.g. HTC Advantage or Universal) but you need really good eyesight to use it on the common 2.8" VGA screened smartphone.
However, on a 320x320 screen, it works pretty well. I use it on my Samsung i780 and while the text is small, it is perfectly readable, and well worth the extra information you can squeeze onto the screen.
RealVGA allows you to switch between resolutions at will, with just a soft reset required to change. On a VGA device you get the choice of 144, 128 and 96dpi and on a 320x320 screen, 128 and 96dpi (96dpi is the highest res, smallest font mode the screen will do).
As for using it on the new Palms, although originally written for the HTC Advantage, RealVGA worked pretty much straight away on the i780 (which was the first WM device with a 320x320 screen), so hopefully it should be pretty straightforward to use on the Palm. The only real difficulty is with a few programs that use non-scalable graphics that need a bit of tweaking to look right (e.g. phone dialler skins, games etc).
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Just call me Berd. 
