Sharp develops VGA cell phone with Vodafone

Sharp will unveil a new cell phone at next week's 3GSM World Congress that boasts a screen resolution about four times that of today's high-end models, it said Friday.

The phone, which was developed with Japan's Vodafone KK, features a 2.4-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) with VGA (640 pixels by 480 pixels) resolution. No other details of the phone were available.

The resolution of cell phone screens has been steadily increasing. Currently many top-end models offer QVGA resolution (320 pixels by 240 pixels) resolution but no greater. Only with larger products like PDAs (personal digital assistants) does VGA become a common feature.

With higher resolution, fonts can be made to look smoother, text can be reduced in size to get more on the screen, and images can be made sharper and clearer. It also means less scrolling from left to right or up and down if the phone is used to view conventional Web sites, which are typically designed for higher resolution screens.

3GSM begins on Feb. 13 in Barcelona, Spain.