8. Using The OQO Model 01+: The Display

Like most laptops with very small screens, the Model 01+'s display is topnotch. Text is crisp and very easy to read, provided you wear corrective lenses if you're farsighted. Colors are excellent and brightness is fine for indoor use and outdoor use in the shade. There are three brightness levels, set by using the FN key with the less than and greater than keys. Contrast can be adjusted only by moving your hands to change the angle at which you view the display.

The display can be used in landscape or portrait mode. You can choose to have the screen image in its normal position (landscape mode with the keyboard below the display) or you can rotate the screen 90, 180 or 270 degrees from normal. With orientations other than normal, it's difficult to use the joystick and mouse buttons. It's better to use the stylus with these orientations.

The display's normal resolution is 800 x 480. That's a little short of the standard 800 x 600, but Windows manages to use 800 x 480 to good ends. If you want a higher resolution image, you can set the display to 800 x 600, 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 1024. When you view these resolutions on the OQO's display, you're working in virtual mode. You only see the current 800 x 480 portion of the higher res screen at any given time. If, however, you use an external monitor connected to the docking connector and the monitor can handle the resolution you're set for, you see the entire image.

In order to run MobilityGuru's screen brightness and contrast tests on a display, we need to take 64 discrete measures of a totally white screen across the entire display and 64 discrete measures of a totally black screen across the entire display. This requires that we put an 8 x 8 rectangular matrix on the screen. On the OQO's 5" (12.7 cm) display an 8 x 8 matrix produces measurement rectangles so small that our Luminance meter's light probe overlaps multiple rectangles, preventing discrete measures within each of the 64 rectangles. So brightness and contrast tests are not possible.

I can report that the Model 01+'s mean maximum brightness, as measured at five locations across the display (each corner and the center of the display), is around 36 candelas per square meter. By laptop and notebook standards that's not very bright at all. I've seen laptops with mean maximum brightness ranges between 80 candelas/meter^2 and 160 candelas/meter^2. Some notebooks do even better than laptops. The Toshiba Qosimo G25-AV513 still holds top honors with a mean maximum brightness of 335 candelas/meter^2. In spite of the OQO's low mean maximum brightness levels and as I reported earlier, the device's display can be comfortably viewed indoors in moderately bright light and outdoors in the shade.