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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

the obvious disadvantage is no high-dpi touchscreen so you're back to a Blackberry or Palm Treo, things that were sold as business phones.

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And that requires a powerful GPU? I thought a much much simpler 2D accelerator in the style of the S3 911 of yesteryear would be enough.

Swipe up from the bottom of your iPhone. Oops, you're suddenly doing 3D transformations.

There are dozens of UI effects which rely on the GPU, and there's just no such thing as a 2D GPU these days, it makes no sense unless you're building a retro console or something.

> Swipe up from the bottom of your iPhone. Oops, you're suddenly doing 3D transformations.

So don't do that exact effect? This is a pretty weak objection.

> there's just no such thing as a 2D GPU these days, it makes no sense

This might be stronger but I'm not an expert on pixel pushing.

There's quite a step between “you can't have fancy UI animations” and “you're back to BlackBerry” though…

Things like inertial scrolling are not 'fancy UI animations', they're core components of a touch ui. Take out the touch UI and you're back to something like a nicer Treo.

Anyone who has an eInk device (where such animations are impossible due to the refresh rate of the screen) can tell you that it's still fully usable and has nothing to do with getting back to BlackBerry or Treo.

It looks less nice and is limited in some ways, but for business needs to does the job perfectly.

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