Recently I found out about this Landscape Pro V2 that allows you to rotate your s60’s screen both ways, and I wondered how did the app handle it? Manual turning or did S60 had a secret inverse landscape mode?
Turns out that it is the former, and now I’m trying to documentate the differences between the behavior of certain app.
It unlocks the N95 8GB exclusive landscape screensaver, but it actually shows up upside down when holding the N95 270º (just the way it shows up in the N95 8gb).
Menu acts oddly too, it can show up two ways:
Normal landscape view (but the softkeys are inverted in this view, meaning the up left one is options and the right one is exit, just like normal portrait.) (This also happens with custom UI apps, like Nokia Maps 2.0)
Or it can also show up as the native inverse landscape orientation (!!!)
In this way the softkeys are normal and apps act just like normal landscape, just that the blue bars are inverted.
Other example of the native inverse landscape mode:
Now for the even weirder things, as you know the front camera app forces the phone to go to portrait mode when opened in the normal landscape mod, but it allows itself to show up on the inverse landscape:
(This showed up upside down in the N95, with the inverted softkeys, just like the menu)
The regular camera also handles this new orientation surprisingly well:
Just the softkeys stuck to the left side of the screen, like the should to stay near the real keys, expected behaviour.
(btw,the image shows upside down, because there is no way of rotating the sensor, of course)
And then, there’s a couple apps that just screw up everything, for example Device Status (rip :(), didn’t recognize any key press, besides the review/gallery key, so I couldn’t take a screenshot, but when turning it into portrait it showed up like this:
And then there is just some bugs that will probably be ironed out when this landscape mode comes out (FP2?!?), like rotating via software to inverse landscape and then manually to portrait (opening the slide) give you this:
So this is what I have discovered about this mode until now, I had to restart my phone and it is turning on again right now :P But again, I’m impressed of how well S60 handles a screen orientation that isn’t supposed to be there! Ah the benefits of a mature platform!
Edit: N-Gage app also looks weird:
It was physically upside down when launched in the inverse landscape mode. So I can assume that every app that forces the phone into portrait mode (N-Gage, screensaver, front camera) will screw up the screen. And if the N-Gage app doesn’t know how to react to this inverse landscape mode it doesn’t give me hope that we’ll see this mode in FP2… Ah well, maybe in Touch.
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