Fujitsu creates 800x600 PDA LCD

It's all in the backlighting

Fujitsu has succeeded in cramming 480,000 pixels into a 4in PDA-oriented LCD screen - more than four times as many as current PDA screens sport.

Our Palm Tungsten T has a 320 x 320 display. Fujitsu's 4in panel has a resolution of 800x600 - enough, the company claims, to show digital TV pictures. It will also show an entire web page, Fujitsu boasts - but we reckon PDA users will need major eye upgrades if they want to be able to read the text.

The new display doesn't so much add extra pixels as more cleverly use ones already there. Instead of separate red, blue and green pixels of the kind found in today's LCDs, the Fujitsu system uses fast-changing colour backlights to allow a single pixel to display any of the three primary screen colours. The upshot is an effective three-fold increase in the number of pixels.

Still, it will be some time before Fujitsu's high precision display appears in a Palm or Pocket PC near you. The company has so far produced only prototype displays and doesn't expect to commercialise the product for a few years yet. ®