The new Sony Ericsson S700 series offers a unique screen that's well-suited for game development both in terms of physical size, color depth and pixel resolution. The screen is 2.3 inches in size, displays 262K colors and has a resolution of 240 by 320 pixels. Because of the clever button and screen layout, it's also possible for developers to create games that can be run with the phone either held in the standard upright position or with phone rotated 90 degrees. Held horizontally, the phone and screen will have the look and feel you'd expect from any portable game console.

Below is a modified version of the 3Dscroll example from the July newsletter. The code is modified to run with the phone in its horizontal position, just to give an idea of how this mode looks and feels.

Something to consider with a game in the horizontal position is that the soft buttons will still be displayed in their usual place. With the phone in horizontal mode, this means that the soft buttons are shown on the right-hand side of the display and not at the bottom.

If this disturbs the game play, the recommended solution is to limit the use of Commands and soft buttons in horizontal position and instead use the methods in the Canvas and GameCanvas class to read the hard buttons. The limitation of this approach is that ordinary high level GUI components like List can't be used as they always relay on Commands/soft buttons. One possible solution is to design the MIDlet to use these high-level components for options menus and the like with the phone in the standard upright position and use the horizontal position only for the real game play.

Download 3D scroll example for the S700 series>>