Screen Handling

This topic provides information about screen size and display mode.

Variant: ScreenPlay and non-ScreenPlay. Target audience: Application developers.

Screen size independence

Symbian is implemented on many different phones with varying screen sizes. If application developers want their applications to be portable across devices with different screen sizes, they must ensure that they do not hard code any assumptions about screen size in their code. You can find out the area of the screen that is available for drawing at run time by using [[[ERROR: [NOKX000E] Unable to find definition for key reference 'CEikAppUi']]]CEikAppUi::ClientRect().

Screen display mode switching

Before Symbian^3, Symbian supported the automatic switching of the screen display mode—for example, from 2bpp (bits per pixel) to 4bpp. This is no longer supported. The screen display mode is now set when the device starts up based on the SCREENMODE parameter in the wsini.ini file. See The wsini.ini File Reference for more information.

ScreenPlay provides support for externally connected displays, such as TV-out, switching between resolutions at runtime and notifications to Window Server clients when there are changes to the resolution and connectedness. See Display Control and Mapping for more information.

Related concepts

Related reference