I’ve been researching issues related to creating and distributing Flash Lite screensaver/wallpaper content types for the various platforms. I am going post my observations about each platform (s60, series40, SE), starting with Sony Ericsson.

Sony Ericsson

Many, but not all, of the SE phones support SWF for screensaver/wallpaper content types. Some also support SWF for start-up screen, which is the screen that appears after the Sony Ericsson logo animation. Check Device Central for a complete list of supporting devices and available screen space for these content types.

Screen support
(based upon w850i)
Start-up screen animation - display Flash animation for 6+ seconds
Stand-by screen wallpaper- display Flash wallpaper for 17+ seconds
Stand-by screen screensaver– display Flash screensaver for 12+ seconds.

(Timings probably vary between phone models.)

SWF playing as wallpaper for Stand-by screen does not stop when user navigates away from Stand-by screen. It continues to play even though it is not visible. I tested this with a SWF that loops and prints the value of getTimer(), which is the elapsed time of the SWF, into a text box. When I return to the stand-by screen I can see that the timer has advanced by the amount of time I was away from the screen. Wallpaper animation that plays indefinitely will drain battery and CPU resources.

To avoid wasteful use of battery and CPU resources, developers should explicitly stop a given Flash Lite animation content type after the duration of time that the phone displays the animation.

Actually the Flash Lite Wallpaper player pauses the playhead when the user navigates away from the stand-by screen. The player resumes the wallpaper animation at last paused position when the user returns to the stand-by screen. So, battery and cpu resources are not as important an issue as I originally posted.

Stand-by screen foreground imagery
It is useful to consider the appearance of foreground imagery displaying over top of Flash wallpaper content. In the stand-by screen, SE phones display foreground system information such as icons, operator name and digital time and date. The specific location of date and time varies between phone models. The Sony Ericsson Theme creator is a good reference for the position of standby-screen foreground imagery for a given SE phone.

Sony Ericsson stand-by screen
foreground imagery

Some phones have the option to set Digital Time display to “large” which takes more screen space than the standard time display.

Sony Ericsson stand-by screen
with large time format

FSCommand2 Support
According to Device Central, SE Flash lite, supports time, date, signal and battery fscommand2s and that none of the SE FL1.1 phones support FullScreen for screensaver wallpaper content types. I confirm this with tests on a w850i. Also, some of the older devices do not support memory fscommand2s.

Scaling
In my tests on a w850i (240×320 screen), and I assume this true with other SE phones, FL1.1 displays a SWF, with a canvas smaller than screen size, at actual size, centered on screen, and does not scale the SWF to full screen.

176×220 wallpaper does not scale to fullscreen
on a 240×320 SE device.

FL1.1 will scale down SWF, with a canvas larger than screen size, to fit within screen according to canvas aspect ratio. I have not tested these scaling behaviors on a SE FL2.0 phone.

Device Central does not correctly emulate the SE FL1.1 scaling behavior for screensaver and wallpaper content types. The DC emulator always scales SWF to fullscreen for SE profiles.

To ensure that wallpaper/screensaver content displays as intended on SE devices, developers should not rely on scaling and instead publish content to the screen size of the target device.

Themes
Because the SE platform supports Flash wallpapers it is a good idea to consider distributing a theme along with a Flash wallpaper, to configure the stand-by foreground imagery colors to contrast well against a Flash wallpaper image.

At this time most SE phones do not support SWF within a theme, though developers can distribute a separate SWF along with a SE theme package.

The s500i supports Flash animation for many aspects of the operating system user interface through themes. However, using Flash to theme operating system displays is not yet available for other SE FL1.1 phones.

If you have observed any Flash Lite screensaver/wallpaper behavior that is unique to SE phones please share it.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 2:59 pm and is filed under screensaver/wallpaper, Sony Ericsson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.