| Friday, November 10, 2006 |
16:20 - We have the technology
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Something that just occurred to me last night, in the car, where I'm unable to write it down, as things so often do:
I had read David Pogue's fairly unflattering review of the Zune, in which he notes that viewing photos requires you to turn the device on its side and portrait-formatted photos are still crammed the wrong way into the screen. And I was wondering: you know, it's not difficult in software to determine whether a photo is taller than it is wide. And—and—we have digital cameras (mainly SLRs) that can detect automatically whether you're holding it in portrait or landscape mode, so that it can stamp the photos you take with an orientation field in the EXIF tags.
So why not put those two things into the Zune—or, for that matter, the iPod?
You'd see a photo on the screen, constrained to the dimensions of the LCD. You'd notice that it was being shown in portrait mode on a landscape-oriented screen. And rather than pushing orientation-switching buttons like on the Newton, you could just turn the thing on its side, and the screen would automatically rotate and resize the photo to the maximum dimensions.
I know this isn't some breakthrough idea; I mean, many tablet PCs already have the ability to detect the orientation you're holding them in and reflow the screen accordingly. But why not put that into a handheld device? For something like the iPod, where there's one clearly obvious "up" orientation, it's less of a no-brainer; but with the Zune, where the screen is taller than it is wide and where orientation-switching is a core feature, you'd think that this would be a pretty fundamental piece of functionality. Wouldn't you?
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Brian Tiemann
