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Google Nexus One’s luminous OLED screen may be state of the art when it comes to display technology in smartphones but an iPhone’s LCD screen ranks better, according to tests by DisplayMate, a firm that calibrates and optimizes displays.

“The high-resolution, high-pixel-density OLED display on the Nexus One is beautiful, even stunning on first view, but there are lots of issues, problems and artifacts lurking just below the surface,” said Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate, on the company’s blog.

Since OLED displays are still so new, they are yet to be perfected for use in consumer products, which can result in a less-than-optimal experience, he says.

Organic LED displays, or OLEDs, are gaining favor among gadget makers because they can offer a brighter display at lower power than traditional LCDs. The Nexus One has a 3.7-inch screen and a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. The iPhone 3G has a 3.5 inch display with a resolution of 480 x 320 pixels.

To test the Nexus One’s screen, DisplayMate used 24-bit native resolution 800 x 480 test patterns and 24-bit HD resolution test photos.

Their conclusions? The “peak white brightness” of the Nexus One is low for a display that used often in outdoor settings.  In terms of picture quality, the Nexus One  photos had “way too much contrast and color saturation, to the point of appearing gaudy,” says DisplayMate.

The Nexus One’s Gallery app also uses 16-bit color instead of 24-bit color, which results in poor images, says the firm.

Another reason for the Nexus One display’s performance could be the “PenTile pixel arrangement” that it uses, says Soneira. Instead of the three sub-pixels of red, green and blue for every pixel, the Nexus One’s display just divides each pixel into two. Every PenTile pixel includes a green sub-pixel, but the red and blue sub-pixels appear in alternating pixels, he says.

“In principle, that is only a minor issue because if red or blue isn’t available in a particular pixel, then the display driver can just use one from an adjacent pixel. But in practice, it makes things a lot harder for the software and makes it very likely that artifacts will creep into the on-screen images,” says Soneira.

DisplayMate suggests, among other things, Google improve the factory display calibration to correct color saturation and contrast.

Check out their complete two-part series discussing the tests conducted and the results for this Nexus One vs. iPhone 3G shootout.

Not surprisingly, the OLED Association isn’t happy with the results. The tests are flawed and just because the OLED screen does not react the same way as an LCD screen does not mean the former is inferior, Barry Young, managing director of the OLED Association told OLED-Display.net.

Photo: Comparing the Nexus One display to the iPhone/ DisplayMate

Every two weeks, Nicole Lee answers your questions and occasionally gives her opinion on the state of the mobile industry. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-10461614-85.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Dialed In/a/p

See that Storm-esque device there? You may have noticed that the home screen looks positively nothing like the experience you’re used to — and that’s because it’s not. Shown off as part of a slide deck in RIM’s “Super Apps” webinar for developers last week, the company’s official explanation is that this is a pure, off-the-cuff mockup, not indicative of anything they’re working on for future devices or releases of BlackBerry OS. To be fair, when you take the shot in context with the bullet points and the fact that this presentation was geared squarely at devs, we can imagine that they really were just using it to get folks’ creative juices flowing — but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? There’s enough active and location-aware content here to make even a heavily-widgeted Android home screen drool, so seriously, why not do this in 6.0, RIM?

RIM dev webinar hints at BlackBerry OS of the future? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rejoice: PS3s across the land are now once again playable. That’s the word according to our friends at Joystiq, who say that the clock issue affecting “fat” PS3s has been somehow resolved and games are once again working correctly. We’re not sure if this means Sony’s fixed something on the network side or if the internal clock just ran past a certain time, but at least our long nightmare is seemingly over. Hit up Joy for a quick Q/A on the whole situation, including a way to potentially save lost trophy data.

PS3 issues apparently resolved, game on originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google claims that Microsoft is encouraging third party anti-trust lawsuits originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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