Mobile phones have been doing Photo Caller ID since the day after mobile phones first got cameras. To know that even one of the major players in mobile phone operating system software gets this wrong is a tragedy. But to know that it is, in fact, all but one that get it wrong is almost unbelievable.
First, let’s point out the only OS to get it right: iPhone. Right out of the box iPhone displays your contact’s photo beautiful with no additional software required. It crops, resizes, scales, and gives you the best looking photo possible displayed very largely on the iPhone’s display.
Android tries. But it has quite a few issues. First of all, it only uses about 1/4 of the screen’s display to show the photo. Since there’s nothing useful on almost all of the remaining 3/4 of the display, why not fill the screen? Even worse, however, is when you activate your contacts for Google Sync. You see, almost everyone activates their contacts for Google Sync, because it’s easy and awesome. Except for when it comes to Photo Caller ID. You see the phone saves a nice large image to use for the Photo Caller ID. Even lets you crop it square yourself to decide what to show. Then your phone Syncs with Google. Well, Google only supports a 96×96 pixel image for a contact photo. So, when the sync is finished, that’s all you’re left with on your phone. The end result is that Android does the best it can to scale a puny little 96×96 pixel image up to fit the space reserved for contact photo display. You get a nasty looking, pixelated photo that barely resembles your contact at all.
Windows Mobile requires a 3rd party app to get this right. At least, however, once you have it it works well enough. Of course Windows Mobile is dead, so who cares.
Symbian Series 60 requires a 3rd party app as well. Lame.
When it comes to non smart phones, Nokia’s Series 40 is king. The phone does a pretty good job of displaying the photo in as much space as it can acquire. However, it doesn’t maintain aspect ratio, doesn’t give you the option to crop, and really only displays a chunk out of the center of the photo due to other onscreen display items being present. I’ve yet to find a template that shows exactly what size the image should be and which parts of it are completely obscured by onscreen text.
Can all the handset OS developers all just sit down and fix this problem already? And if someone has a template for Series 40 phones, can you send it my way so I don’t have to send myself 100 photos to reverse engineer it?